1 November 1858 – 7 November 1858

P. M. — To Poplar Hill. Many black oaks are bare in Sleepy Hollow. Now you easily detect where larches grow, viz. in the swamp north of Sleepy Hollow. ‘They are far more distinct than at any other season. They are very regular soft yellow pyramids, as I see them from the Poplar Hill. Unlike the pines there is no greenness left to alternate with their yellow, but they are a uniform yellow, and they differ from other yellow trees in the generally regular pyra- midal outline, 7. e. these middling-sized trees. These trees now cannot easily be mistaken for any other, be- cause they are the only conspicuously yellow trees now left in the woods, except a very few aspens of both kinds, not one in a square mile, and these are of a very different hue as well as form, the birches, etc., having fallen. ‘The larch, apparently, will soon be the only yellow tree left in the woods. It is almost quite alone now. But in the summer it is not easy to distinguish them either by their color or form at a dis- tance. If you wish to count the scarlet oaks, do it now. Stand on a hilltop in the woods, when the sun is an hour high and the sky is clear, and every one within range of your vision will be revealed. You might live to the age of Methusaleh and never find a tithe of them otherwise.’ We are not wont to see our dooryard as a part of the earth’s surface. The gardener does not perceive that some ridge or mound in his garden or lawn is related to yonder hill or the still more distant mountain in the hori- zon, 1s, perchance, a humble spur of the last. We are wont to look on the earth still as a sort of chaos, formless and lumpish. I notice from this height that the curving moraine forming the west side of Sleepy Hollow is one of several arms or fingers which stretch away from the hill range that runs down the north side of the Boston road, turning northward at the Court-House; that this finger-like moraine is continued northward by itself al- most to the river, and points plainly enough to Ponkaw- tasset Hill on the other side, even if the Poplar Hill range itself did not indicate this connection; and so the sloping cemetery lots on the west of Sleepy Hollow are related to the distant Ponkawtasset. The smooth-shaven knoll in the lawn, on which the children swing, is, perchance, only a spur of some mountains of the moon, which no travel- ler has ever reached, heaved up by the same impulse. The hawthorn is but three-quarters fallen and is a greenish yellow or yellowish green. I hear in the fields just before sundown a shriller chirping of a few crickets, reminding me that their song is getting thin and will soon be quenched. As I stood on the south bank of the river a hundred rods southwest of John Flint’s, the sun being just about to enter a long and broad dark-blue or slate-colored cloud in the horizon, a cold, dark bank, I saw that the reflection of Flint’s white house in the river, prolonged by a slight ripple so as to reach the reflected cloud, was a very distinct and luminous light blue. As the afternoons grow shorter, and the early evening drives us home to complete our chores, we are reminded of the shortness of life, and become more pensive, at least in this twilight of the year. We are prompted to make haste and finish our work before the night comes. — I leaned over a rail in the twilight on the Walden road, waiting for the evening mail to be distributed, when such thoughts visited me. I seemed to recognize the November evening as a familiar thing come round again, and yet I could hardly tell whether I had ever known it or only divined it. The November twilights just begun! It appeared like a part of a panorama at which I sat spectator, a part with which I was perfectly familiar just coming into view, and I foresaw how it would look and roll along, and prepared to be pleased. Just such a piece of art merely, though infinitely sweet and grand, did it appear to me, and just as little were any active duties required of me. We are independent on all that we see. The hangman whom I have seen cannot hang me. The earth which I have seen cannot bury me. Such doubleness and distance does sight prove. Only the rich and such as are troubled with ennui are implicated in the maze of phenomena. You cannot see anything . until you are clear of it. The long railroad causeway through the meadows west of me, the still twilight in which hardly a cricket was heard,’ the dark bank of clouds in the horizon long after sunset, the villagers crowding to the post-office, and the hastening home to supper by candle-light, had I not seen all this before! What new sweet was I to extract from it? ‘Truly they mean that we shall learn our lesson well. Nature gets thumbed like an old spelling-book. ‘The almshouse and Frederick were still as last November. I was no nearer, methinks, nor further off from my friends. Yet I sat the bench with perfect contentment, unwilling to exchange the familiar vision that was to be unrolled for any trea- sure or heaven that could be imagined. Sure to keep just so far apart in our orbits still, in obedience to the laws of attraction and repulsion, affording each other only steady but indispensable starlight. It was as if I was promised the greatest novelty the world has ever seen or shall see, though the utmost possible novelty would be the difference between me and myself a year ago. This alone encouraged me, and was my fuel for the approaching winter. ‘l'hat we may behold the pano- rama with this slight improvement or change, this is what we sustain life for with so much effort from year to year. And yet there is no more tempting novelty than this new November. No going to Europe or another world is to be named with it. Give me the old familiar walk, post-office and all, with this ever new self, with this in- finite expectation and faith, which does not know when it is beaten. We'll go nutting once more. We ’ll pluck the nut of the world, and crack it in the winter evenings. Theatres and all other sightseeing are puppet-shows in comparison. I will take another walk to the Chiff, an- other row on the river, another skate on the meadow, be out in the first snow, and associate with the winter birds. Here I am at home. In the bare and bleached crust of the earth I recognize my friend. One actual Frederick that you know is worth a million only read of. Pray, am I altogether a bachelor, or am I a widower, that I should go away and leave my bride? This Morrow that is ever knocking with irre- sistible force at our door, there is no such guest as that. I will stay at home and receive company. I want nothing new, if I can have but a tithe of the old secured to me. I will spurn all wealth beside. Think of the consummate folly of attempting to go away from here! When the constant endeavor should be to get nearer and nearer here. Here are all the friends I ever had or shall have, and as friendly as ever. Why, I never had any quarrel with a friend but it was Just as sweet as unanimity could be. I do not think we budge an inch forward or backward in relation to our friends. How many things can you go away from? They see the comet from the northwest coast just as plainly as we do, and the same stars through its tail. Take the shortest way round and stay at home. A man dwells in his native valley like a corolla in its calyx, like an acorn in its cup. Here, of course, is all that you love, all that you expect, all that you are. Here is your bride elect, as close to you as she can be got. Here is all the best and all the worst you canimagine. What more do youwant? Bear here- away then! Foolish people imagine that what they im- agine is somewhere else. ‘That stuff is not made in any factory but their own.

P. M. — To Cliff. A cool gray November afternoon; sky overcast. Looking back from the causeway, the large willow by Mrs. Bigelow’s and a silvery abele are the only leafy trees to be seen in and over the village, the first a yellow- ish mass, also some Lombardy poplars on the outskirts. It is remarkable that these (and the weeping willow, yet green) and a few of our Populus tremuloides (lately the grandidentata also *), all closely allied, are the only trees now (except the larch and perhaps a very few small white birches) which are conspicuously yellow, almost the only deciduous ones whose leaves are not withered, 2. e. ex- cept scarlet oaks, red oaks, and some of the others, etc. I see here and there yet some middle-sized conifer- ous willows, between humilis and discolor, whose upper leaves, left on, are quite bright lemon-yellow in dry places. These single leaves brighter than their prede- cessors which have fallen. The pitch pine is apparently a little past the midst of its fall. In sprout-lands some young birches are still rather leafy and bright-colored. Going over the newly cleared pasture on the northeast of Fair Haven Hill, I see that the scarlet oaks are more generally bright than on the 22d ult. Even the little sprouts in the russet pasture and the high tree-tops in the yew wood burn now, when the middle-sized bushes in the sprout-lands havemostly gone out. The large scarlet oak trees and tree-tops in woods, perhaps especially on hills, apparently are late because raised above the influence of the early frosts. Methinks they are as bright, even this dark day, as 1 ever saw them. The blossoming of the scarlet oak! the forest flower, surpassing all in splendor (at least since the maple)! I do not know but they in- terest me more than the maples, they are so widely and equally dispersed throughout the forest; they are so hardy, a nobler tree on the whole, lasting into Novem- ber; our chief November flower, abiding the approach of winter with us, imparting warmth to November pros- pects. It is remarkable that the latest bright color that is general should be this deep, dark scarlet and red, the intensest of colors, the ripest fruit of the year, like the cheek of a glossy red ripe apple from the cold Isle of Orleans, which will not be mellow for eating till next spring! When I rise to a hilltop, a thousand of these great oak roses, distributed on every side as far as the horizon! This my unfailing prospect for a fortnight past as surely as I rose to a hilltop! This late forest- flower surpasses all that spring or summer could do. Their colors were but rare and dainty specks, which made no impression on a distant eye. Now it is an ex- tended forest or a mountain-side that bursts into bloom, through or along which we may journey from day to day. I admire these roses three or four miles off in the hori- zon. Comparatively, our gardening is on a petty scale, the gardener still nursing a few asters amid dead weeds, ignorant of the gigantic asters and roseswhich, as it were, overshadow him and ask for none of his care. Compara- tively, itis like a little red paint ground ona teacup and held up against the sunset sky. Why not take more ele- vated and broader views, walk in the greater garden, not skulk in a little “debauched” nook of it? Consider the beauty of the earth, and not merely of a few impounded herbs? However, you will not see these splendors, whe- ther you stand on the hilltop or in the hollow, unless you are prepared to see them. ‘The gardener can see only the gardener’s garden, wherever he goes. The beauty of the earth answers exactly to your demand and appreciation.’ Apples in the village and lower ground are now gen- erally killed brown and crisp, without having turned yellow, especially the upper parts, while those on hills and [in] warm places turned yellowish or russet, and so ripened to their fall. Of quince bushes the same, only they are a little later and are greener yet. The sap is now frequently flowing fast in the scarlet oaks (as I have not observed it in the others), and has a pleasant acorn-like taste. Their bright tints, now that most other oaks are withered, are connected with this phenomenon. They are full of sap and life. They flow like a sugar maple in the spring. It has a pleasantly as- tringent taste, this strong oak wine.’ That small poplar seen from Cliffs on the 29th is a P. tremuloides. It makes the impression of a bright and clear yellow at a distance, though it is rather dingy and spotted. It is later, then (this and the Baker Farm one), than any P. grandidentata that I know. Looking down on the oak wood southeast of Yew Wood, I see some large black oak tops a brown yellow still; so generally it shows life a little longer than the white and swamp white apparently. One just beyond the smallpox burying-ground is generally greenish in- clining to scarlet, looking very much like a scarlet oak not yet completely changed, for the leaf would not be distinguished. However, the nuts, with yellow meat, and the strong bitter yellow bark betrayed it. Yet it did not amount to scarlet. I see a few shrub oak leaves still fresh where sheltered. The little chinquapin has fallen. I go past the Well Meadow Field. There is a sym- pathy between this cold, gray, overcast November after- noon and the grayish-brown oak leaves and russet fields. The Scotch larch is changed at least as bright as ours.

Colder weather, true November weather, comes again to-night, and I must rekindle my fire, which I had done without of late. IT must walk briskly in order to keep warm in my thin coat. P. M. — To Annursnack. T am inclined to think that pignuts fall earlier than mocker-nuts, 2. €. the leaves, and that the first are now about fallen (?). Those on Nawshawtuct are bare, but I see a great many hickories of some kind not nearly bare. Monroe’s arbor-vitee hedge has fallen. Put it with the white pine. The jay is the bird of October. I have seen it repeatedly flitting amid the bright leaves, of a differ- ent color from them all and equally bright, and taking its flight from grove to grove. It, too, with its bright color, stands for some ripeness in the bird harvest. And its scream! it is as if it blowed on the edge of an October leaf. It is never more in its element and at home than when flitting amid these brilliant colors. No doubt it de- lights in bright color, and so has begged for itself a bril- liant coat. It is not gathering seeds from the sod, too busy to look around, while fleeing the country. It is wide awake to what is going on, on the qui vive. It flies to some bright tree and bruits its splendors abroad. By fall I mean literally the falling of the leaves, though some mean by it the changing or the acquisition of a brighter color. This I call the autumnal tint, the ripen- ing to the fall. The only white birch leaves now seen are those linger- ing green terminal leaves of the 23d, now at last turned yellow,’ for they are now burnt upward to the last spark and glimmering. Methinks the birch ripens its leaves very perfectly though gradually. I should say that that tree which ripened its leaves well, like this, was better suited to the climate than one like the locust and most apples, — which was mostly killed by frost first annually. Perhaps this tells at last on the constitution of the tree, and that variety would be safest to cultivate which matured its leaves best. The pitch pine fallen and falling leaves now and for some time have not been bright or yellow, but brown. At base of Annursnack I find one or two fringed gen- tians yet open, but even the stems are generally killed. I notice that the cows lately admitted to the mead- ows and orchards have browsed the grass, etc., closely, on that strip between the dry hillside and the wet meadow, where it is undoubtedly sweetest and freshest yet, and where it chances that this late flower the gentian grows. There, too, grows the herbage which is now the most grateful to the cattle. Also Aster undulatus is still freshly in bloom; yarrow, etc., ete. Much Lycopodium complanatum not open yet. Returning, I see at the very northwest end of the White Cedar Swamp a little elder, still quite leafy and green, near the path on the edge of the swamp. Its leafets are commonly nine, and the lower two or more are commonly divided. This seemed peculiarly downy beneath, even “sub-pubescent,” as Bigelow describes the Sambucus pubens to be. Compare it with the com- mon.’ Also by it ts Viburnum nudum, still quite fresh and green, the slender shoots from starting plants very erect and straight. The lower leaves of the water andromeda are now red,” and the lambkill leaves are drooping (is it more than before?) and purplish from the effect of frost in low swamps like this. Though I listen for them, I do not hear a cricket this afternoon. I think that I heard a few in the after- noon of November Ist. They then sounded peculiarly distinct, being but few here and there on a dry and warm hill, bird-like. Yet these seemed to be singing a little louder and in a little loftier strain, now that the chirp of the cricket generally was quenched. How long we will follow an illusion! On meeting that one whom I call my friend, I find that I had imagined something that was not there. I am sure to depart sad- der than I came. Nothing makes me so dejected as to have met my friends, for they make me doubt if it is possible to have any friends. I feel what a fool Lam. I cannot conceive of persons more strange to me than they actually are; not thinking, not believing, not doing as I do; interrupted by me. My only distinction must be that I am the greatest bore they ever had. Not in a single thought agreed; regularly balking one another. But when I get far away, my thoughts return to them. That is the way I can visit them. Perhaps it 1s unac- countable to me why I care for them. Thus I am taught that my friend is not an actual person. When I have withdrawn and am alone, I forget the actual person and remember only my ideal. Then I have a friend again. I am not so ready to perceive the illusion that 1s in Nature. I certainly come nearer, to say the least, to an actual and joyful intercourse with her. Every day I have more or less communion with her, as I think. At least, I do not feel as if I must withdraw out of nature. I feel like a welcome guest. Yet, strictly speaking, the same must be true of nature and of man; our ideal is the only real. It is not the finite and temporal that satisfies or concerns us in either case. I associate the idea of friendship, methinks, with the person the most foreign to me. This illusion 1s perpet- uated, like superstition in a country long after civiliza- tion has been attained to. We are attracted toward a particular person, but no one has discovered the laws of this attraction. When I come nearest to that other actu- ally, I am wont to be surprised at my selection. It may be enough that we have met some tvme, and now can never forget it. Some time or other we paid each other this wonderful compliment, looked largely, humanly, divinely on one another, and now are fated to be ac- quaintances forever. In the case of nature I am not so conscious of this unsatisfied yearning. Some oak woods begin to look bare, and even smoky, after their fashion.

A rainy day. Called to C. from the outside of his house the other afternoon in therain. At length he put his head out the attic window, and I inquired if he did n’t want to take a walk, but he excused himself, saying that he had a cold. “But,” added he, “you can take so much the longer walk. Double it.”’ On the Ist, when I stood on Poplar Hill, I saw a man, far off by the edge of the river, splitting billets off a stump. Suspecting who it was, I took out my glass, and beheld Goodwin, the one-eyed Ajax, in his short blue frock, short and square-bodied, as broad as for his height he can afford to be, getting his winter’s wood; for this is one of the phenomena of the season. As surely as the ants which he disturbs go into winter quarters in the stump when the weather becomes cool, so does G. revisit the stumpy shores with his axe. As usual, his powder-flask peeped out from a pocket on his breast, his gun was slanted over a stump near by, and his boat lay a little further along. He had been at work laying wall still further off, and now, near the end of the day, betook himself to those pursuits which he loved better still. It would be no amusement to me to see a gentle- man buy his winter wood. It is to see G. get his. I helped him tip over a stump or two. He said that the owner of the land had given him leave to get them out, but it seemed to mea condescension for him to ask any man’s leave to grub up these stumps. The stumps to those who can use them, I say, — to those who will split them. He might as well ask leave of the farmer to shoot the musquash and the meadow-hen, or I might as well ask leave to look at the landscape. Near by were large hollows in the ground, now grassed over, where he had got out white oak stumps in previous years. But, strange to say, the town does not like to have him get his fuel in this way. They would rather the stumps would rot in the ground, or be floated down-stream to the sea. They have almost without dissent agreed on a different mode of living, with their division of labor. They would have him stick to laying wall, and buy corded wood for his fuel, as they do. He has drawn up an old bridge sleeper and cut his name in it for security, and now he gets into his boat and pushes off in the twilight, saying he will go and see what Mr. Musquash 1s about. When the Haverhill fishermen told me that they could distinguish the Concord River stuff (7. e. driftwood) I see they were right, for much of it is chestnut rails, and of these they have but few, and those in the southern part of New Hampshire. If, about the last of October, you ascend any hill in the outskirts of the town and look over the forest, you will see, amid the brown of other oaks, which are now with- ered, and the green of the pines, the bright-red tops or crescents of the scarlet oaks, very equally and thickly distributed on all sides, even to the horizon. Complete 1858} SEEING 285 trees standing exposed on the edges of the forest, where you have never suspected them, or their tops only in the recesses of the forest surface, or perhaps towering above the surrounding trees, or reflecting a warm rose red from the very edge of the horizon in favorable lights. All this you will see, and much more, if you are prepared to see it, — if you look for it. Otherwise, regular and uni- versal as this phenomenon is, you will think for threescore years and ten that all the wood is at this season sere and brown. Objects are concealed from our view not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray (continued) as because there is no intention of the mind and eye toward them. We do not realize how far and widely, or how near and narrowly, we are to look. The greater part of the phenomena of nature are for this rea- son concealed to us all our lives. Here, too, as in politi- cal economy, the supply answers to the demand. Nature does not cast pearls before swine. There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate, — not a grain more. The actual objects which one person will see from a particular hilltop are just as different from those which another will see as the persons are different. The scarlet oak must, in a sense, be in your eye when you go forth. We cannot see any- thing until we are possessed with the idea of it, and then we can hardly see anything else. In my botanical rambles I find that first the idea, or image, of a plant occupies my thoughts, though it may at first seem very foreign to this locality, and for some weeks or months I go thinking of it and expecting it unconsciously, and at length I surely see it, and it is henceforth an actual neighbor of mine. This is the history of my finding a score or more of rare plants which I could name. Take one of our selectmen and put him on the highest hill in the township, and tell him to look! What, prob- ably, would he see? What would he select to look at? Sharpening his sight to the utmost, and putting on the glasses that suited him best, aye, using a spy-glass if he liked, straining his optic nerve to its utmost, and making a full report. Of course, he would see a Brocken spec- tre of himself. Now take Julius Cesar, or Emanuel Swedenborg, or a Fiji-Islander, and set him up there! Let them compare notes afterward. Would it appear that they had enjoyed the same prospect? For aught we know, as strange a man as any of these is always at our elbows. It does not appear that anybody saw Shakespeare when he was about in England looking off, but only some of his raiment. Why, it takes a sharpshooter to bring down even such trivial game as snipes and woodcocks; he must take very particular aim, and know what he is aiming at. He would stand a very small chance if he fired at random into the sky, being told that snipes were flying there. And so it is with him that shoots at beauty. Not till the sky falls will he catch larks, unless he is a trained sports- man. He will not bag any if he does not already know its seasons and haunts and the color of its wing, — if he has not dreamed of it, so that he can anticipate it; then, indeed, he flushes it at every step, shoots double and on the wing, with both barrels, even in corn-fields. The sportsman trains himself, dresses, and watches un- weariedly, and loads and primes for his particular game. He prays for it, and so he gets it. After due and long pre- paration, schooling his eye and hand, dreaming awake and asleep, with gun and paddle and boat, he goes out after meadow-hens, — which most of his townsmen never saw nor dreamed of, — paddles for miles against a head wind, and therefore he gets them. He had them half-way into his bag when he started, and has only to shove them down. The fisherman, too, dreams of fish, till he can almost catch them in his sink-spout. The hen scratches, and finds her food right under where she stands; but such is not the way with the hawk. The true sportsman can shoot you almost any of his game from his windows. It comes and perches at last on the barrel of his gun; but the rest of the world never see it, with the feathers on. He will keep himself supplied by firing up his chimney. The geese fly exactly under his zenith, and honk when they get there. Twenty musquash have the refusal of each one of his traps before it is empty.”

Humphrey Buttrick says that he finds old and young of both kinds of small rails, and that they breed here, though he never saw their nests. P. M. — Up Assabet. The river has risen somewhat, on account of rain yesterday and the 30th. So it was lowest the 30th. That great fleet of leaves of the 21st October is now sunk to the bottom, near the shore, and are [s7c] flatted out there, paving it thickly, and but few recently fallen are to be seen on the water; and in the woods the leaves do not lie up so crisp since the rain. Saw Stewart shoot a Carolina rail, which was standing on the side of a musquash-cabin off Prichard’s, within two rods of him. ‘This has no black throat and is prob- ably the female. The large shallow cups of the red oak acorns look like some buttons I have seen which had lost their core. The Cornus florida on the Island is still full-leafed, and is now completely scarlet, though it was partly green on the 28th. It is apparently in the height of its color there now, or, if more exposed, perhaps it would have been on the Ist of November. This makes it the latest tree to change. ‘The leaves are drooping, like the C.. serwcea, while those of some sprouts at its base are horizontal. Some incline to crimson. A few white maples are not yet bare, but thinly clothed with dull-yellow leaves which still have life in them. Judging from the two aspens, this tree, and the willows, one would say that the earliest trees to leaf were, perhaps, the last to lose their leaves. Little dippers were seen yesterday. The few remaining topmost leaves of the Salix sericea, which were the last to change, are now yellow like those of the birch. Water milkweed has been discounting some days, with its small upright pods. I hear one cricket this louring day. Since but one is heard, it is the more distinct and therefore seems louder and more musical. It is a clearer note, less creaking than before. A few Populus grandidentata leaves are still left on. The common smooth rose leaves are pretty conspicu- ously yellow yet along the river, and some dull-reddish high blackberry is seen by the roads. Also meadow- sweet is observed yet with the rose. It is quite still; no wind, no insect hum, and no note of birds, but one hairy woodpecker. ‘That lake grass, Glyceria fluitans, is, me- thinks, more noticeable now than in summer on the sur- face of the fuller stream, green and purple. Meadow- sweet is a prominent yellow yet.

Yesterday was a still and cloudy day. This is another rainy day. On the whole, we have had a good deal of fair weather the last three months. Mr. Buttrick, the marketman, says he has been to Boston twenty-seven times since the first of August, and has not got wet till to-day, though he rides in an open wagon. I guessed at Goodwin's age on the Ist. He is hale and stout and looks younger than he is, and I took care to set him high enough. I guessed he was fifty-five, and he said that if he lived two or three months longer he would be fifty-six. He then guessed at my age, thought I was forty. He thought that Emerson was a very young-look- ing man for his age, “But,” said he, “he has not been out o’ nights as much as you have.” Some horse-chestnuts are still thickly leaved and yel- low, not withered.

P. M. — To Bateman’s Pond. It cleared up this forenoon. I leave my boat opposite the Hemlocks. I see the cold sunlight from some glade between the clouds falling on distant oak woods, now nearly bare, and as I glance up the hill between them, seeing the bare but bright hillside beyond, I think, Now we are left to the hemlocks and pines with their silvery light, to the bare trees and withered grass. The very rocks and stones in the rocky roads (that beyond Farm- er’s) look white in the clear November light, especially after the rain. We are left to the chickadee’s familiar notes, and the jay for trumpeter. What struck me was a certain emptiness beyond, between the hemlocks and the hill, in the cool, washed air, as if I appreciated even here the absence of insects from it. It suggested agree-. ably to me a mere space in which to walk briskly. The fields are bleak, and they are, as it were, vacated. The very earth is like a house shut up for the winter, and I go knocking about it in vain. But just then I heard a chickadee on a hemlock, and was inexpressibly cheered to find that an old acquaintance was yet stirring about the premises, and was, I was assured, to be there all winter. All that is evergreen in me revived at once. The very moss, the little pine-tree moss, in Hosmer’s meadow is revealed by its greenness amid the withered grass and stubble. Hard frosts have turned the cranberry vines to a dark purple. I hear one faint cricket’s chirp this afternoon. Going up the lane beyond Farmer’s, I was surprised to see fly up from the white, stony road, two snow bunt- ings, which alighted again close by, one on a large rock, the other on the stony ground. They had pale-brown or tawny touches on the white breast, on each side of the head, and on the top of the head, in the last place with some darker color. Had light-yellowish bills. They sat quite motionless within two rods, and allowed me to approach within a rod, as if conscious that the white rocks, etc., concealed them. It seemed as if they were attracted to surfaces of the same color with themselves, — white and black (or quite dark) and tawny. One squatted flat, if not both. Their soft rippling notes as they went off reminded me [of] the northeast snow-storms to which ere long they are to be an accompaniment. I find in a swamp witch-hazel buds still opening, for here they are sheltered, but I can find no fringed gen- tian, blue, near Bateman’s Pond. But Aster undulatus and several golden rods, at least, may be found yet. I see Lycopodium dendroideum' which has not yet shed pollen. In and about Fox Castle Swamp, lambkill is reddened about as much as ever. Round-leaved cornel is bare. The nuthatch is another bird of the fall which I hear these days and for a long time, — apparently ever since the young birds grew up. The Cornus florida by the pond is quite bare; how long? (That at Island still thickly leaved.) So that I can only say that the sheltered C. florida change much later than the scarlet oak generally, and perhaps the former 1s to be considered later on the whole. Methinks those scarlet oaks, those burning bushes, begin to be rare in the landscape. They are about Bate- man’s Pond, at any rate. My apple harvest! It is to glean after the husband- man and the cows, or to gather the crop of those wild trees far away on the edges of swamps which have es- caped their notice. Now, when it is generally all fallen, if indeed any is left, though you would not suppose there were any on the first survey, nevertheless with experi- enced eyes I explore amid the clumps of alder (now bare) and in the crevices of the rocks full of leaves, and prying under the fallen and decaying ferns which, with apple and alder leaves, thickly strew the ground. From amid the leaves anywhere within the circumference of the tree, I draw forth the fruit, all wet and glossy, nib- bled by rabbits and hollowed out by crickets, but still with the bloom on it and at least as ripe and well kept, if not better than those in barrels, while those which lay exposed are quite brown and rotten. Showing only a blooming cheek here and there between the wet leaves, or fallen into hollows long since and covered up with the leaves of the tree, — a proper kind of packing. I fill my pockets on each side, and as I retrace my steps, I eat one first from this side, and then from that, in order to pre- serve my balance. And here and there is one lodged as it fell between the bases of the suckers which spring thickly from a horizontal limb. In the midst of an alder clump, covered by leaves, there it lies, safe from cows which might smell 1t out and unobserved by the hus- bandman; reserved for me. It is too late, generally, to look for the handsome ones now. The exposed are decayed or decaying. Looking southwest toward the pond just before sun- set, I saw against the light what I took to be a shad-bush in full bloom, but without a leafet. I was prepared for this sight after this very warm autumn, because this tree frequently puts forth new leaves in October. Or it | might be a young wild apple. Hastening to it, I found | it was only the feathery seeds of the virgin’s-bower, whose vine, so close to the branches, was not noticeable. They looked just like dense umbels of white flowers, and in this light, three or four rods off, were fully as white as white apple blossoms. It is singular how one thing thus puts on the semblance of another. I thought at first I had made a discovery more interesting than the blossom- ing of apple trees in the fall. This, I thought, which I never saw nor heard of before, must be the result of that wonderfully warm weather about the 19th and 20th of October. It carried me round to spring again, when the shad-bush, almost leafless, is seen waving its white blos- soms amid the yet bare trees. The feathery masses at in- tervals along the twigs, just like umbels of apple bloom, so caught and reflected the western light. The small beeches are still covered with withered leaves, but the larger are three-quarters bare. The Diplopappus linariifolius, which was yellow in the shade, in open and sunny places is purple. I see the small botrychium leaf in Hosmer’s meadow still firm, but a reddish brown or leather-color. Rounding the Island just after sunset, I see not only the houses nearest the river but our own reflected in the river by the Island. From what various points of view and in what unsuspected lights and relations we sooner or later see the most familiar objects! I see houses re- flected in the river which stand a mile from it, and whose inhabitants do not consider themselves near the shore. I pass a musquash-house, apparently begun last night. The first mouthfuls of weeds were placed between some small button-bush stems which stood amid the pads and pontederia, for a support and to prevent their being washed away. Opposite, I see some half concealed amid the bleached phalaris grass (a tall coarse grass), or, in some places, the blue-joint.