15 August 1859 – 21 August 1859

Thursday. Half the leaves of some cher- ries in dry places are quite orange now and ready to fall.

Sunday. P. M.— Walk over the Great Meadows and observe how dry they are. There is quite a drought, and I can walk almost anywhere over these meadows without wetting my feet. It is much drier than it was three weeks ago there. It is like the summer of °54. Almost all the grass has been cut and carried off. It is quite dry crossing the neck of the Holt. In many holes in the meadow, made by the ice, the water having dried up, I see many small fishes — pouts and pickerel and bream — left dead and dying. In one place there were fifty or one hundred pouts from four to five inches long with a few breams, all dead and dry. It is re- markable that these fishes have not all been devoured by birds or quadrupeds. The blue herons must find it easy to get their living now. Are they not more common on our river such years as this? In holes where the water has just evaporated, leav- ing the mud moist, I see a hundred little holes near to- gether, with occasionally an indistinct track of a bird between. Measuring these holes, I find them to be some two inches deep, or about the length of a snipe’s bill, and doubtless they were made by them. I start one snipe. People now (at this low stage of water) dig mud for their compost-heaps, deepen wells, build bank walls, perchance, along the river, and in some places make bathing-places by raking away the weeds. Many are ditching.