11 July 1859 – 17 July 1859

Another hot day with blue haze, and the sun sets red, threatening still hotter weather, and the very moon looks through a somewhat reddish air at first. The position of the button-bushes determines the width of the river, no less than the width or depth of the water determines the position of the button-bushes. We call that all river between the button-bushes, though sometimes they may have landed or sprung up in a regu- Jar brink fashion three or four rods further from, or nearer to, the channel. That mass (described on the 9th, seen the 10th) in the Wayland meadows above Sherman’s Bridge was, I think, the largest mass drifted or growing at all on that great meadow. So this transplantation is not on an in- significant scale when compared with [the] whole body that grows by our river. The largest single mass on the Wayland meadows, considering both length and breadth, was the recently drifted one. ‘To-day the farmer owns a meadow slightly inclined toward the river and generally (2. e. taking the year together) more or less inundated on that side. ‘To-morrow it is a meadow quite cut off from the river by a fence of button-bush and black wil- low, a rod or more in width and four to seven or eight feet high, set along the inundated side and concealing the river from sight.

Another hot day. 96° at mid-afternoon. P. M. — To Assabet Bath. The elm avenue above the Wheeler farm is one of the hottest places in the town; the heat is reflected from the dusty road. The grass by the roadside begins to have a dry, hot, dusty look. The melted ice is running almost in a stream from the countryman’s covered wagon, con- taining butter, which is to be conveyed hard to Boston market. He stands on the wheel to relieve his horses at each shelf in the ascent of Colburn Hill. I think I have distinguished our eriophorums now. There is the E. vaginatum, the earliest, out long ago; the E. polystachyon, well out June 19th; and to-day I see the E. gracile, which apparently has not been out quite so long as the last. Its leaves are channelled tri- angular. Saw yesterday the E. Virginicum, apparently in bloom, though very little woolly or reddish as yet, — a dense head. The taller dark rhynchospora is well out. In the evening, the moon being about full, I paddle up the river to see the moonlight and hear the bullfrogs. The toads and the pebbly dont dont are most common. There are fireworks in the village, — rockets, blue lights, etc. I am so far off that I do not hear the rush of the rocket till it has reached its highest point, so that it seems to be produced there. So the villagers entertain them- selves this warm evening. Such are the[ir]aspirations. I see at 9.30 p. M. a little brood of four or five barn swallows, which have quite recently left the nest, perched close together for the night on a dead willow twig in the shade of the tree, about four feet above the water. Their tails not yet much grown. When I passed up, the old bird twittered about them in alarm. I now float within four feet, and they do not move or give sign of awaking. I could take them all off with my hand. They have been hatched in the nearest barn or elsewhere, and have been led at once to roost here, for coolness and security. There is no cooler nor safer place for them. I observe that they take their broods to the telegraph-wire for an aenal perch, where they teach them to fly. They have gone to their beach.

P. M.—Sounded river from Ball’s Hill (7. e. off Squaw [?] Harbor) to Atkins’s boat-house corner. The river, in all the above distance, nowhere washes the base of an isolated (2. e. to except long, lowish hill- banks like Clamshell, etc.) steep hill, without a greater depth off it. The average depth between Sudbury Causeway and Atkins’s boat-house bend at wall, or for fifteen miles two hundred and eighty-two rods, is eight and one eighth feet. There extends from Tarbell Hill to Skelton Bend what I will call the Straight Reach, a mile and a third ™, long and quite straight. This is the finest water view, making the greatest impression of size, of any that I know on the river. It is very broad, deep, and clear of weeds. Average depth 11+ feet (and at highest water some 19 feet). The bottom is almost everywhere muddy. No weeds in the middle. Measuring on the plan by Baldwin, it is three to four hundred feet wide. The depth is also very uniform, varying but little (in the thread) from the average 11+ (except a deep hole and chan- nel at the commencement off Tarbell Hill). Yesterday (the 13th) Frank Adams brought me a bird’s nest and egg from an apple tree near the road by Addison Fay’s house. He says it was about twelve feet high in the tree, and it appears to have been in a fork. The nest is most like a kingbird’s, or a stout, thick cherry-bird’s, or even a very thick tanager’s, or a purple finch’s half as large again as usual. The egg is the size and form of the pheebe’s, but blue-white. The nest is three inches high and five inches wide outside, two inches deep and two and a half wide inside; composed of coarse stubble, strings, coarse root-fibre, etc., exter- nally, and neatly lined with fine withered grass. The egg is pale blue-white, four tenths of an inch long by three tenths wide at the larger end, being broad at one end like a pheebe’s. Can it be a cherry-bird’s without spots and of the form described by Wilson ? He also has a very large cuckoo’s egg, which again makes me suspect that we have the yellow-billed cuckoo.

P. M.— To Ledum Swamp. First notice Canada thistle, Aralia hispida, Stachys aspera, and Asclepias pulchra. 'The Eriophorum vagina- tum done. The white orchis not yet, apparently, for a week or more. Hairy huckleberry still in bloom, but chiefly done. | Gather a few Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum. Rasp- berries, In one swamp, are quite abundant and appar- ently at their height. July 16 and 18. Afternoons, I sounded the Assabet as far up as the stone bridge. This bridge, as I see by the town records, was talked about (7. e. the building) in 1807, and was probably built that year or the next (though E. Wood says that the Turnpike Company, who then proposed to build it, did not fulfill their contract). Shattuck’s date, 1802, is wrong. Accordingly, by building this narrow bridge here, twenty-five feet in width, or contracting the stream to about one fourth its average width, the current has been so increased as to wash away about a quarter of an acre of land which rises a dozen or fourteen feet above water (or at least an acre four feet in depth) and dig a hole six times the average depth of the stream, twenty-two and a half feet deep, or considerable, 2. e. three feet, deeper than any place in the main stream from Sudbury Causeway to Atkins’s boat-house bend, and all this in fifty years... Yet the depth under the bridge is only two and a half feet plus. It falls in four rods from two and a half to twenty-two and a half. A considerable island has been formed there, at least ~ three feet and a half above low water, composed of sand, and, two or three rods lower, are deposited the stones, generally larger than a hen’s egg, without sand, forming bars and islands quite distinct from the former. This is much the swiftest place on the stream thus far and deeper than any for twenty-five miles of [the] other stream, and consequently there is a great eddy, where I see cakes of ice go round and round in the spring, and, as usual, the shoal water and islands formed by the ruins of the bank and of the bottom are close by. As usual, the shoal water is produced by the rapidity of the current close by. The sand and gravel are deposited chiefly in the im- mediate neighborhood of the swiftest water, the swift water producing an eddy. Hence, apparently, the sandy islands at the junction of the rivers, the sand-bar at the swift place on the Assabet, etc. Contract the stream and make it swift, and you will wear a deep hole and make sand-bars and islands below.