9 November 1857 – 15 November 1857

Surveying for Stedman Buttrick and Mr. Gordon. Jacob Farmer says that he remembers well a par- ticular bound (which is the subject of dispute between the above two men) from this circumstance: He, a boy, was sent, as the representative of his mother, to witness the placing of the bounds to her lot, and he remembers that, when they had fixed the stake and stones, old Mr. Nathan Barrett asked him if he had a knife about him, upon which he pulled out his knife and gave it to him. Mr. Barrett cut a birch switch and trimmed it in the presence of young Farmer, and then called out, “Boy, here’s your knife;” but as the boy saw that he was going to strike him when he reached his hand for the knife, he dodged into a bush which alone received the blow. And Mr. Barrett said that if it had not been for that, he would have got a blow which would have made him remember that bound as long as he lived, and explained to him that that was his design in striking him. He had before told his mother that since she could not go to the woods to see what bounds were set to her lot, she had better send Jacob as a representative of the family. This made Farmer the important witness in this case. He first, some years ago, saw Buttrick trimming up the trees, and told him he was on Gordon’s land and pointed out this as the bound between them. One of the company to-day told of George Melvin once directing Jonas Melvin, for a joke, to go to the widow Hildreth’s lot (along which we were measuring) and gather the chestnuts. They were probably both working there. He accordingly took the oxen and cart and some ladders and another hired man, and they worked all day and got half a bushel. Mr. Farmer tells me that one Sunday he went to his barn, having nothing to do, and thought he would watch the swallows, republican swallows. The old bird was feeding her young, and he sat within fifteen feet, overlooking them. 'There were five young, and he was curious to know how each received its share; and as often as the bird came with a fly, the one at the door (or opening) took it, and then they all hitched round one notch, so that a new one was presented at the door, who received the next fly; and this was the invariable order, the same one never receiving two flies in succession. At last the old bird brought a very small fly, and the young one that swallowed it did not desert his ground but waited to receive the next, but when the bird came with another, of the usual size, she com- menced a loud and long scolding at the little one, till it resigned its place, and the next in succession received the fly. Bigelow, the tavern-keeper, once, wrote C., put up this advertisement in the streets of Concord, “ All those who are in favor of the universal salvation of mankind, are requested to meet at the school-house (?) next Saturday evening (?), to choose officers.” Very warm to-day; rainy in forenoon.

Clear and fine Indian-summer day. P. M. — To Lincoln limestone with E. Hoar. Hoar showed me last evening the large fossil tooth of a shark, such as figured in Hitchcock, which he bought at Gay Head the other day. He also bought one or more other species. I heard, day before yesterday, much firing of guns in the chestnut woods by Curly-pate Hill, probably at gray squirrels. George Buttrick says it is late for them; were thickest in chestnut time. That cellar-hole off northwest of Brooks Clark’s is where Boaz Brown used to live, and the andromeda swamp behind is “ Boaz’s (pronounced Boze’s) meadow,” says Jacob Farmer, who has seen corn growing in the meadow. ‘The Lincoln limestone dips east by north, strikes north by west; the hornblende slate (?) on Bare Hill, northeast and northwest.

Some rain in the night. I see, on a white oak on Egg Rock, where the squir- rels have lately made a nest for the winter of the dry oak leaves, probably using those on the tree before they fell. Now that the top of the oak is bare, this is a dark round mass against the sky, as big as a peck measure, very conspicuous. There are considerable many still hanging on the lower parts. I suspect it is a gray squir- rel’s nest. I observed on the 7th, between the site of Paul Adams’s and Bateman’s Pond, in quite open land, some very prominent Indian corn-hills. I should say that they were higher above the intermediate surface than when they were first made. It was a pasture, and they were thickly covered with grass and lichens. Perhaps the grass had grown better on the hillocks, and so they had grown while the intermediate spaces had been more trodden by the cows. These very regular round grassy hillocks, extending in straight rows over the swells and valleys, had a singular effect, like the burial-ground of some creatures. I find that I can see the sun set from almost any hill in Concord, and some within the confines of the neigh- boring towns, and though this takes place at just about 5 p. M., when the cows come in, get to the post-office by the time the mail is distributed. See the sun rise or set if possible each day. Let that be your pill. How speedily the night comes on now! There is some duski- ness in the afternoon light before you are aware of It, the cows have gathered about the bars, waiting to be let out, and, in twenty minutes, candles gleam from distant windows, and the walk for this day is ended. It remains only to get home again. Who is weary? Why do we cease work and go to bed? Who taught men thus to spend their nights and days? Yet I must confess that I am surprised when I find that particu- lar wise and independent persons conform so far as regularly to go to bed and get up about the same time with their neighbors. My assistants and company in surveying on the 9th were, Gordon and Buttrick, the principals in the dispute; Jacob Farmer, the principal witness; George Buttrick, son of Stedman; and French, son-in-law of Gordon. I had the most to do with Gordon, who came after me. He was quite eloquent at our house on the subject of two neighbors disputing at his time of life about a “pelfry” sum or a few rods of land; seemed really to have a very good heart; thought that the main thing in this life was to keep up friendly relations; and as he rode along, would quote Scrip- ture in a low tone, and put his whole soul into some half-whispered expression which I could not hear, but nevertheless nodded assent to. He thought it was too bad that he should have spent his seventy-third birthday settling that dispute in the woods. Apparently did not know it till afterwards. Buttrick is a rather large man, in more senses than one. His portly body as he stood over the bound was the mark at which I sighted through the woods, rather too wide a one for accuracy. He did not cease to regret for a day or two that I should have had no dinner, but Gordon detained me. Buttrick said that he had a piece of meat cooked and expected me at his house. Thought it too bad in Gordon to make a man go without his dinner, etc. He offered me a glass of gin, or wine, as I chose. Lamented the cutting down of apple orchards and scarcity of cider-mills. Told of an orchard in the town of Russell, on the side of a hill, where the apples rolled down and lay four feet deep (?) against a wall on the lower side, and this the owner cut down. Farmer, half a dozen years since, saw Buttrick trimming up the trees there and observed [to] him, “You are on Mr. Gordon’s land.” This was the begin- ning of the trouble. Buttrick adhered to the bounds which Abel Brooks, who sold to him, had pointed out. Farmer was sure of the bounds between them, be- cause when Jacob Brown’s Bateman wood-lot was divided between Mrs. Farmer (his mother) and her sister, the mother of Mrs. Gordon, he had witnessed the setting of the bounds as the representative of his mother, and came near being whipped at this one.

P. M.— Ride to limestone quarries on old Carlisle road with E. Hoar. This morning it was considerably colder than for a long time, and by noon very much colder than here- tofore, with a pretty strong northerly wind. The prin- cipal flight of geese was November 8th, so that the bulk of them preceded this cold turn five days. You need greatcoat and buffalo and gloves now, if you ride. I find my hands stiffened and involuntarily finding their way to my pockets. No wonder that the weather is a standing subject of conversation, since we are so sensitive. If we had not gone through several winters, we might well be alarmed at the approach of cold weather. With this keener blast from the north, my hands suddenly fail to fulfill their office, as it were begin to die. We must put on armor against the new foe. I am almost world-ridden suddenly. I can hardly tie and untie my shoe-strings. What a story to tell an inhabitant of the tropics, — perchance that you went to walk, after many months of warmth, when suddenly the air became so cold and hostile to your nature, that it benumbed you so that you lost the use of some of your limbs, could not untie your shoe-strings or un- button your clothes! This cold weather makes us step more briskly.? I hear that the Indians say we are to have a hard win- ter, because of the abundance of acorns, also because of the unusual thickening of corn-husks in the summer! The stone at those quarries strikes northeasterly and southwesterly, or apparently with the rocks of Curly-pate, a third of a mile off. The strata appear to be nearly vertical. In the most southwesterly quarry, I noticed in the side of an upright sliver of rock, where the limestone had formerly been blasted off, the bot- tom of the nearly perpendicular hole which had been drilled for that purpose, two or three inches deep and about two and a half feet from the ground. In this I found two fresh chestnuts, a dozen or more amphi- carpea seeds, as many apparently either prinos:(?) or rose (?) seeds (single seeds and fresh), and several fresh barberry seeds mixed with 4 little earth and rub- bish. What placed them there? Squirrel, mouse, jay, or crow? At first I thought that a quadruped could hardly have reached this hole, but probably it could easily, and it was a very cunning place for such a deposit. I brought them all home in order to ascertain what the seeds were and how they came there. Examining the chestnuts carefully in the even- ing and wondering if so small a bird as a chickadee could transport one, I observed near the larger end of one some very fine scratches, which it seemed to me might have been made by the teeth of a very small animal when carrying it, but certainly not by the bill of a bird, since they had pricked sharply into the shell, rucking it up one way. I then looked to see where the teeth of the other jaw had scratched it, but could discover no marks and was therefore still somewhat in doubt. Coming up-stairs an hour afterward, I ex- amined those scratches with a microscope, and saw plainly that they had been made by some fine and sharp cutting instrument like a fine chisel, a little con- cave, and had plowed under the surface of the shell a little, toward the big end of the nut, raising it up; and, looking farther, I now discovered, on the larger end of the nut, at least two corresponding marks made by the lower incisors, plowing toward the first and about a quarter of an inch distant. These were a little less obvious to the unarmed eye, but no less plain through the glass. I now had no doubt that they were made by the incisors of a mouse, and, comparing them with the incisors of a deer mouse (Mus leucopus) whose skull I have; I found that one or two of the marks were just the width of its two incisors combined (a twentieth of an inch), and the others, though finer, might have been made by them. On one side, at least, it had taken fresh hold once or twice. I have but little doubt that these seeds were placed there by a Mus leucopus, our most common wood mouse. The other nut, which. had no marks on it, I suppose was carried by the star end, which was gone from both. There was no chest- nut tree within twenty rods. These seeds thus placed in this recess will account for chestnut trees, barberry bushes, etc., etc., growing in chinks and clefts where we do not see how the seeds could have fallen. There was earth enough even in this little hole to keep some very small plant alive. I hear that Gardiner Heywood caught a trout in Wal- den Pond the other day and that it weighed five pounds.’ It seems that the Abel Davis who caught the pickerel in Temple Brook, which would make such a meal for his “Lavinia” and himself, was addicted to talking to himself, thinking aloud. He was once talked of for captain of the company, and about that time, they say, was overheard saying to himself, “‘ Captain Abel Davis! What a fine-looking man!” Can those straight ridges running north by west and south by east over the most level part of Curly-pate have anything to do with diluvial furrows ? Returning along the edge of Calla Swamp, under the fern-clad hill, I feel the crunching sound [sic] of frost-crystals in the heaving mud under my feet, and see and feel the sphagnum already stiffened into a crust, and what probably in the forenoon was water trickling from a fern-clad rock is now half a dozen icicles, six or eight inches long. Such is the first freez- ing day. Such phenomena are first observed under the north side of a hill in a cold swamp like this. Such are the first advances of winter. Ice-crystals shoot in the mud, the sphagnum becomes a stiffened mass, and dropping water in these cold places, a rigid icicle. E. Hoar tells me that his partner, having a new adobe house, or perhaps roof to it, built in Santa Bar- bara, on the California coast, corrected the bad level- ling of his carpenters by taking such a position as to make the ridge-pole coincide with the horizon line where the Pacific appeared to meet the sky. The thermometer is 27° at 6 p. M. The mud in the street is stiffened under my feet. this evening. Where there is a wall near a pitch pine wood, I see the scales of the cones which the squirrels have carried to the wall and stripped, strewn all along the wall on the ground.

The obvious falling of leaves (2. e., not to include the fall of the pitch pines and larches and the complete fall of the birches, white willows, etc.) ended about the first of November. A very few bright-colored leaves on small shrubs, such as oak sprouts, black cherry, blueberry, etc., have lingered up to this time in favorable places. By the first of November, or at most a few days later, the trees generally wear, in the main, their winter aspect, their leaves gradually falling until spring. P. M. — To Holden Swamp and C. Miles Swamp. Where the earth has been freshly exposed and so lies light, it is now heaved up and white with asbestos- like crystals two or three inches long, which sink and are crunched by my feet. Cold pools in shady woods and under the north sides of walls are now skimmed over. Ice a quarter of an inch thick. I see its large flaky crystals like low undulations, a mosaic of slightly concave, perhaps triangular pieces. The paths whose surface was frozen each night are now thawing and wet. The water of the brook beyond Hubbard’s Grove, where it spreads out a little, though not frozen, is clear, cold, and deserted of life. There are no water-bugs nor skaters on it. Rennie, in “Library of Entertain- ing Knowledge,” says they are seen all winter on some pools in England, 2. e. the Gyrinus natator. I see no ants on the great ant-hills, and methinks I have not for three weeks at least. There is but little insect-life abroad now. You wonder what nourishment the cattle can extract from the withered and bleached grass. This cold blast has swept the water-bugs from the pools. My walk is the more lonely when I perceive that there are no ants now upon their hillocks in field or wood. ‘These are deserted mounds. They have commenced their winter’s sleep. I break my way into the midst of Holden Swamp to get a specimen of Kalmia glauca leaf. ‘The surface is composed of great porous tussocks, or hummocks, of sphagnum, fifteen or twenty inches high or more, about the stems of blueberry bushes, choke-berry, water andromeda, swamp-pink, spruce, etc., etc., in which my feet sink five or six inches, and my shoes are filled with the rubbish. The water is frozen solid in the leaves of the pitcher- plants. This is the thickest ice I’ve seen. This water was most exposed in the cool swamp. I part the scraggy bushes with my hands and press my way through them. I come out covered with the fragments of lichens and rotten twigs and sphagnum. Going by my owl-nest oak, I saw that it had broken off at the hole and the top fallen, but, seeing in the cav- ity some leaves, I climbed up to see what kind of nest it was and what traces of the owls were left. Having shinned up with some difficulty to the top of this great stump some fifteen or eighteen feet high, I took out the leaves slowly, watching to see what spoils had been left with them. Some were pretty green, and all had evidently been placed there this fall. When I had taken all out with my left hand, holding on to the top of the stump with my right, I looked round into the cleft, and there I saw, sitting nearly erect at the bottom in one corner, a little Mus leucopus, panting with fear and with its large black eyes upon me. I held my face thus within seven or eight inches of it as long as I cared to hold on there, and it showed no sign of re- treating. When I put in my hand, it merely withdrew downward into a snug little nest of hypnum and ap- parently the dirty-white wool-like pappus of some plant as big as a batting-ball. Wishing to see its tail, I stirred it up again, when it suddenly rushed up the side of the cleft, out over my shoulder and right arm, and leaped off, falling down through a thin hemlock spray some fifteen or eighteen feet to the ground, on the hillside, where I lost sight of it, but heard it strike. It will thus make its nest at least sixteen feet up a tree, improving some cleft or hollow, or probably bird’s nest, for this purpose. ‘These nests, [ suppose, are made when the trees are losing their leaves, as those of the squirrels are. At C. Miles Swamp, I see that the larches have fin- ished falling since the 8th (say the 12th?). Find plenty of Andromeda Polifolia there, where you can walk dry-shod in the spruce wood, together with Kal- mia glauca. ‘The former is linear, about twice as long and two thirds as broad as the latter, alternate mucronate, round-stemmed. The Kalmia glauca has fewer leaves now, opposite, glossy above; a very sharp two-edged twig, the edges springing from the base of the leaves and decussating like them, so that when the twig is held up to the light it appears alternately thicker and thinner. This plant is commonly seen now with only a few narrow and erect young leaves in a tuft near the end of the twigs, but in many cases older, broader, and nearly horizontal ones, half a dozen of them along the last four or five inches of the twig. The andromeda is most white beneath; the other is more greenish. The white willows, which retain many of their leaves even yet, are of a peculiar buff (?) or fawn (?) color. Raspberry shoots, too, have their bloom like the thimble-berry, but they are not so rank nor smooth. Of the evergreen trees described by Loudon, methinks these it would be worth the while to have on one’s prem- ises : — Pinus sylvestris, Scotch pine or fir; the most val- uable pine of Europe. Looks like our pitch pine. Pinus Pinaster, which is planted on the sands in France. Abies excelsa, the lofty or Norway spruce fir. Perhaps Picea pectinata, the comb-like-leaved sil- ver fir. The Scotch larch, which is not indigenous in Britain, but on the mountains of the middle of Europe. I have, Of western American trees: — The Pinus Lambertiana, the gigantic or Lambert’s pine, Columbia River, one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet high, twenty to near sixty in circumference, allied closely to P. Strobus. Abies Douglass, northwestern America, one hun- dred to one hundred and eighty feet high. Picea grandis, great silver fir, northern California, one hundred and seventy to two hundred feet high.