12 September 1859 – 18 September 1859

P.M.—'To Moore’s Swamp and Great Fields. Elder-berries are apparentlyin prime, generally black, though many have been plucked by birds. The four kinds of bidens (frondosa, connata, cernua, and chrysanthemoides) abound now, but much of the Beckit was drowned by the rise of the river. Omitting this, the first two are inconspicuous flowers, cheap and ineffectual, commonly without petals, like the erech- thites, but the third and fourth are conspicuous and interesting, expressing by their brilliant yellow the ripeness of the low grounds. Most of the late flowers are already associated in my mind with cooler and clearer, flashing weather, as the witch-hazel, the gentians, the Bidens cernua, Spiran- thes cernua, Polygonum amphibium and hydropipe- roides in its prime, and the Polygala sanguinea, still prevalent. I stand in Moore’s Swamp and look at Garfield’s dry bank, now before the woods generally are changed at all. How ruddy ripe that dry hillside by the swamp, covered with goldenrods and clumps of hazel bushes here and there, now more or less scarlet. The golden- ~ rods on the top and the slope of the hill are the Solidago nemorailis, at the base the taller S. altissima. The whole hillside is perfectly dry and ripe. Many a dry field now, like that of Sted Buttrick’s on the Great Fields, is one dense mass of the bright- golden recurved wands of the Solidago nemoralis (a little past prime), waving in the wind and turning up- ward to the light hundreds, if not a thousand, flowerets each. It is the greatest mass of conspicuous flowers in the year, and uniformly from one to two feet high, just rising above the withered grass all over the largest fields, now when pumpkins and other yellow fruits begin to gleam, now before the woods are noticeably changed. Some field where the grass was too thin and wiry to pay for cutting, with great purplish tufts of Andropogon furcatus, going to seed, interspersed. Such a mass of yellow for this field’s last crop! Who that had botanized here in the previous month could have foretold this more profuse and teeming crop? All ringing, as do the low grounds, with the shrilling of crickets and locusts and frequented by honey-bees (2. e. the goldenrod nemoralis). The whole field turns to yellow, as the cuticle of a ripe fruit. This is the season when the prevalence of the goldenrods gives such a ripe and teeming look to the dry fields and to the swamps. They are now (the arguta being about done) the nemoralis and altissima, both a little past prime. The S. nemoralis spreads its legions over the dry plains now, as soldiers muster in the fall. It is a muster of all its forces, which I review, eclipsing all other similar shows of the year. Fruit of August and September, sprung from the sun-dust. The fields and hills appear in their yellow uniform. There are certain fields so full of them that they might give their name to the town or region, as one place in England is called Saffron Wal- den. Perhaps the general prevalence of yellow is greater now when many individual plants are past prime. I notice in Moore’s Swamp that though the potato vines were killed long since, few if any weeds are. They survive to perpetuate their race, until severer frosts come. The beach plums are about ripe; the black cherries nearly gone. I start a flock of five turtle doves from the dry Great Fields, near buckwheat. They go off with a whistling note. A profusion of wild fruits, agreeable to the eye if not palate, is seen along some walls and hedges now. Take this dry wall-side by Sted Buttrick’s field now, though probably not remarkably rich. Here I find elder-berries, panicled cornel, acorns of various kinds, black cherry (nearly gone), green-briar berries, grapes, hazelnuts (the pale-brown nuts now peeping between the husks), alternate cornel (which is about done), sumach, choke- berry, and haws; and earlier there were shad-berries, thimble-berries, and various kinds of huckle- and black- berries, etc. Some shrub oak acorn cups are empty, but they have not many fallen. Large yellowish cater- pillars, heaped on the leaves, have so stripped some shrub oaks as to expose and reveal the acorns. The other day a tender-hearted man came to the depot and informed Neighbor Wild that there was a Maltese cat caught in a steel trap near the depot, which perhaps was his. Wild thought it must be his or ‘‘Min Thoreau.” She had tried to jump over a fence with the trap on her leg, but had lodged one side while the trap hung the other. The man could not stand to open the trap, the cat scratched so, but at length he threw the trap over, and so the cat went home, dragging it to Wild’s (for it was his cat), and the man advised him to keep the trap to pay the one who set it for his inhumanity. I suspect, however, that the cat had wan- dered off to Swamp Bridge Brook and there trod in a trap set for mink or the like. It is a wonder it does not happen oftener. I saw a star-nosed mole dead in the path on Conan- tum yesterday, with no obvious wound.

P. M. — Up Assabet. The Bidens chrysanthemoides, now apparently in its prime by the river, now almost dazzles you with its great sunny disk. I feast my eyes on it annually. It grows but sparingly near the village, but those few never fail to make their appearance at last. The yellow lily’s is a cool yellow in comparison, but in this is seen the concentrated heat of autumn. Now, while other fruits are ripe or ripening, I see the great peduncle of the peltandra, eighteen or twenty- four inches long, curving downward, with its globular mass of green fruit, often two inches in diameter, at the end, looking like slung shot. This mass of viscid seeds or nuts must be the food of many creatures. Also the pontederia spike is now generally turned downward beneath the water and increased in size, though some have flowers still at their tips. So, too, probably (for I do not see them) the yellow and white lilies are ripening their seeds in the water and mud beneath the surface.’ The bloom and freshness of the river was gone as soon as the pickerel-weed began to be imbrowned, in the latter part of August. It is fall and harvest there now. I remember my earliest going a-graping. (It was a wonder that we ever hit upon the ripe season.) There was more fun in finding and eying the big purple clusters high on the trees and climbing to them than in eating them. We used to take care not to chew the skins long lest they should make our mouths sore. Some haws of the scarlet thorn are really a splendid fruit to look at now and far from inedible. They are not only large, but their beauty is enhanced by the persistent calyx relieving the clear scarlet of the fruit. There are various degrees of living out-of-doors. You must be outdoors long, early and late, and travel far and earnestly, in order to perceive the phenomena of the day. Even then much will escape you. Few live so far outdoors as to hear the first geese go over. I see some shrub oak acorns turned dark on the bushes and showing their meridian lines, but generally acorns of all kinds are green yet. The great red oak acorns have not fallen. It is a wonder how pigeons can swallow acorns whole, but they do. Many hemlock leaves which had prematurely rip- ened and withered in the dry weather have fallen in ™~ the late winds and washed up along the side of the river, — already red there.

High, gusty winds, with dust and a little rain (more or less for two or three days). These powerful gusts fill all the air with dust, con- cealing the earth and sky. P. M. — To Cliffs via Hubbard’s Bath. The Spiranthes cernua has a sweet scent like the clethra’s. The mountain sumach appears to bear quite spar- ingly. Its berries are a hoary crimson and not bright like those of the smooth. Also they are in looser masses. They are, perhaps, a little later, but I think ripe now. I see in the swamp under the Cliffs the dark, decay- ing leaves of the skunk-cabbage, four or five spread- ing every way and so flat and decayed as to look like a fungus or mildew, making it doubtful at first what plant it is; but there is the sharp green bud already revealed in the centre between the leaf-stalks, ready to expand in the spring. This wind has strewn the Fair Haven Hill-side with apples. I think that fully three quarters of all are on the ground. Many trees are almost entirely stripped, the whole crop lying in a circular form beneath, yet hard and green. Others on the hillside have rolled far down. The farmers will be busy for some time gathering these windfalls. The winds have come to shake the apple trees prematurely, making fruit (for pies) cheap, I trust, against Thanksgiving or Cattle-Show.' Not only apples and other fruit, but a great many green as well as withered leaves, strew the ground under almost all kinds of trees. I notice of late the green or ripe pods of the Orchi- dacee, — some for a long time, — including gymnode- nia, lady’s-slipper, etc.; pods full of a fine, dust-like seed. The dusty-seeded Orchidacee. The yellow lily (Nuphar advena) fruit, now green and purplish, is ripening under water, oo . of this form and size: 7 «tai full of yellow seeds: ts ff The » white ee 7 lily, mS ? when stripped of the blackened and de- *\ é caying petals, etc., is of this form: \ Even the tough-twigged mocker-nut, yet green, is blown off in some places. I bring home a twig with three of its great nuts together, as big as small apples, and children follow and eye them, not knowing what kind of fruit it is. Like the fruits, when cooler weather and frosts arrive, we too are braced and ripened. When we shift from the shady to the sunny side of the house, and sit there in an extra coat for warmth, our green and leafy and pulpy thoughts acquire color and flavor, and per- chance a sweet nuttiness at last, worth your cracking. Now all things suggest fruit and the harvest, and flowers look late, and for some time the sound of the flail has been heard in the barns. They are catching pigeons nowadays. Coombs has a stand west of Nut Meadow, and he says that he has just shot fourteen hawks there, which were after the pigeons. I have one which he has shot within a day or two and calls a pigeon hawk. It is about twenty inches in alar extent. Above dark-slate or brownish with the edges, 2. ¢. tips, of the feathers (especially of wing- coverts) rufous. The primaries and secondaries dark or blackish brown, barred with black, and only a [sic] some white concealed on the inner vanes near the base. Wings beneath white or whitish, thickly barred with dark. Scapulars with white spots. Head much muti- lated, but no “black spots” visible, but apparently the dark brown mixed or edged with rufous. Cere, etc., said to have been green. : Beneath brownish-white, centred with brown, y with a darker line through that. Femorals still ° more rustyish brown, with central dashes. Legs ‘- yellowish. Tail slate, with four black bars half an inch or more wide; the edge slate, with a very narrow edging of white; beneath the slate is almost white.

Yesterday was very cold, with northwest wind, and this morning the first frost in the garden, killing some of our vines. W. Ricketson says that, when looking for insects this morning under the loose bark of an apple tree on Naw- shawtuct, he found a bat hanging there which measured eleven feet [szc], alar extent. P. M. — To Annursnack. Dense flocks of pigeons hurry-skurry over the hill. Pass near Brooks’s pigeon-stands. There was a flock perched on his poles, and they sat so still and in such regular order there, being also the color of the wood, that I thought they were wooden figures at first. They were perched not only in horizontal straight lines one above the other, which the cross-bars required, but at equal distances apart on these perches, which must be their own habit; and it struck me that they made just such a figure seen against the sky as pigeonholes cut in a doves’ house do, 7. e. a ed more or less triangular figure, thus: ‘ . and —possi- bly the seeing them .« 4, . . ,thus perched might have originally suggested this arrangement of the ~ ~ ~~ holes. Pigeons dart by on every side, — a dry slate color, like weather-stained wood (the weather-stained birds), fit color for this aerial traveller, a more subdued and earthy blue than the sky, as its field (or path) is between the sky and the earth, — not black or brown, as is the earth, but a terrene or slaty blue, suggesting their aerial resorts and habits. The Emersons tell me that their Irishman, James, held his thumb for the calf to suck, after dipping it in a pitcher of milk, but, the milk not coming fast enough, [the calf] butted (or bunted) the pitcher to make the milk come down, and broke it. The grain of the wild rice is all green yet. I find that Temple raises his own tobacco. The great leaves were spread over the bottom and sides of a hay- rigging in his barn, by the open door, to dry. He . smokes them. He says that the season is rather short for it here, but I saw some still growing and in bloom abundantly. What kind is it? “Cuby, they call it.” He smokes it and thinks it better than any he can buy.

Another and severer frost, which cut off all our vines, etc., lespedeza, corn, ete. P. M. — By the roadside, forty or fifty rods east of the South Acton station, I find the Aster Nove-Anglie, apparently past prime. I must call it a plant of this vicinity, then. I thought it “in prime or a little past” at Salem, September 21, 1858. I will venture to put it with the A. puniceus. Young Nealy says that there are blue-winged teal about now. Others are out after ducks. Nealy says he shot the first golden plover he has seen, this morning. How unpromising are promising men! Hardly any disgust me so much. I have no faith in them. They make gratuitous promises, and they break them gratu- itously. | When an Irishwoman tells me that she wouldn’t tell a lie for her life (because I appear to doubt her), it seems to me that she has already told a lie. She holds herself and the truth very cheap to say that so easily. What troubles men lay up for want of a little energy and precision! A man who steps quickly to his mark leaves a great deal of filth behind. There’s many a well-meaning fellow who thinks he has a hard time of it who will not put his shoulder to the wheel, being spell- bound, — who sits about, as if he were hatching his good intentions, and every now and then his friends get up a subscription for him, and he is cursed with the praise of being “a clever fellow.” It would really be worth his while to go straight to his master the devil, if he would only shake him up when he got there. Men who have not learned the value of time, or of anything else; for whom an infant school and a birchen rod is still and for- ever necessary. A man who is not prompt affects me as a creature covered with slime, crawling through mud and lying dormant a great part of the year. Think of the numbers — men and women—who want and will have and do have (how do they get it?!) what they will not earn! The non-producers. How many of these bloodsuckers there are fastened to every helpful man or woman in this world! They constitute this world. It is a world full of snivelling prayers, — whose very religion is a prayer! As if beggars were admirable, were respectable, to anybody! Again and again I am surprised to observe what an interval there is, in what is called civilized life, between the shell and the inhabitant of the shell, — what a disproportion there is between the life of man and his conveniences and luxuries. The house is neatly painted, has many apartments. You are shown into the sitting-room, where is a carpet and couch and mirror and splendidly bound Bible, daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, photographs of the whole family even, on the mantelpiece. One could live here more deliciously and improve his divine gifts better than in a cave surely. In the bright and costly saloon man will not be starv- ~ ing or freezing or contending with vermin surely, but he will be meditating a divine song or a heroic deed, or perfuming the atmosphere by the very breath of his natural and healthy existence. As the parlor is preferable to the cave, so will the life of its occupant be more godlike than that of the dweller in the cave. I called at such a house this afternoon, the house of one who in Europe would be called an operative. The woman was not in the third heavens, but in the third kitchen, as near the wood-shed or to outdoors and to the cave as she could instinctively get, for there she belonged, — a coarse scullion or wench, not one whit superior, but in fact inferior, to the squaw in a wigwam, — and the master of the house, where was he? He was drunk somewhere, on some mow or behind some stack, and I could not see him. He had been having a spree. If he had been as sober as he may be to-morrow, it would have been essentially the same; for refinement Is not in him, it is only in his house, — in the appliances which he did not invent. So is it in the Fifth Avenue and all over the civilized world. There is nothing but confusion in our New England life. The hogs are in the parlor. This man and his wife — and how many like them! — should have sucked their claws in some hole in a rock, or lurked like gypsies in the outbuild- ings of some diviner race. They ’ve got into the wrong boxes; they rained down into these houses by mis- take, as it is said to rain toads sometimes. They wear these advantages helter-skelter and without appreciat- ing them, or to satisfy a vulgar taste, just as savages wear the dress of civilized men, just as that Indian chief walked the streets of New Orleans clad in nothing but a gaudy military coat which his Great Father had given him. Some philanthropists trust that the houses will civilize the inhabitants at last. The mass of men, just like savages, strive always after the outside, the clothes and finery of civilized life, the blue beads and tinsel and centre-tables. It is a wonder that any load ever gets moved, men are so prone to put the cart before the horse. We do everything according to the fashion, just as the Flatheads flatten the heads of their children. We conform ourselves in a myriad ways and with infinite pains to the fashions of our time. We mourn for our lost relatives according to fashion, and as some nations hire professed mourners to howl, so we hire stone-masons to hammer and blast by the month and so express our grief. Or if a public character dies, we get up a regular wake with eating and drinking till midnight. Grasshoppers have been very abundant in dry fields for two or three weeks. Sophia walked through the Depot Field a fortnight ago, and when she got home picked fifty or sixty from her skirts, — for she wore hoops and crinoline. Would not this be a good way to clear a field of them, — to send a bevy of fashionably dressed ladies across a field and leave them to clean their skirts when they get home? It would supplant anything at the patent office, and the motive power is cheap. T am invited to take some party of ladies or gentlemen on an excursion, — to walk or sail, or the like, — but by all kinds of evasions I omit it, and am thought to ~, be rude and unaccommodating therefore. They do not consider that the wood-path and the boat are my studio, where I maintain a sacred solitude and cannot admit promiscuous company. I will see them occasion- ally in an evening or at the table, however. They do not think of taking a child away from its school to go a-huckleberrying with them. Why should not I, then, have my school and school hours to be respected? Ask me for a certain number of dollars if you will, but do not ask me for my afternoons.

Considerable rain yesterday, raising the streams at last somewhat. The frost of the 16th was very severe for the season, killing all our vines, and to-day I see the corn, much of which was not yet topped, all withered and white, and the lespedeza withered in the paths, etc., etc., grape-vines very generally, and the ground-nut. P. M.—To Grape Cliff. There is an abundant crop of cones on the white pines this year,’ and they are now for the most part brown and open. They make a great show even sixty rods off. The tops of the high trees for six or ten feet downward are quite browned with them, hanging straight downward. It is worth the while to observe this evidence of fertility, even in the white pine, which commonly we do not regard as a fruit-bearing tree. It is worth a long walk to look from some favorable point over a pine forest whose tops are thus covered with the brown cones just opened, — from which the winged seeds have fallen or are ready to fall. It is really a rich and interesting sight. How little observed are the fruits which we do not use! How few attend to the ripening and dispersion of the pine seed! From the observation of this year I should say that the fringed gentian opened before the witch-hazel, for though I know many more localities of the last than the first, I do not find the last out till to-day, and it cannot have been out but a day or two. Grape-vines are cut off, 7. e. the leaves, before they have generally turned, this year. The witch-hazel fruit appears to be now opening. The double-fruited stone splits and reveals the two shining black oblong seeds. It has a peculiarly formed nut, in pretty clusters, clothed, as it were, in close-fitting buckskin, amid the now yellowing leaves. I hear the chewink note now more than a month ago, and it sounds cool and solitary. Rice, who walks with me, thinks that that fine early sedge grass would be a capital thing to stuff cushions and beds with, it is so tough. (In hollows in woods.) See checkerberries not yet fully grown nor ripe, some- what pear-shaped, and whitish at the blossom end. A bear-berry ripe. One might at first expect that the earth would bear its best men within the tropics, where vegetation is most luxuriant and there is the most heat. But the temperate zone is found to be most favorable to the growth and ripening of men. This fruit attains to the finest flavor there. So, methinks, it is neither the stem nor blossom end of a fruit that is sweetest and maturest, but its — blossom cheek or temperate zone, the portion that lies under its temperate zone. I suspect that the south pole is the stem end of the globe and that Europe and America are on its rosy cheek, and fortunate are we who live in America, where the bloom is not yet rubbed off. I have seen no Viburnum nudum berries for some time. They are considerably earlier than the V. Lentago. Dr. Bartlett handed me a paper to-day, desiring me to subscribe for a statue to Horace Mann. I declined, and said that I thought a man ought not any more to take up room in the world after he was dead. We shall lose one advantage of a man’s dying if we are to have a statue of him forthwith. This is probably meant to be an opposition statue to that of Webster. At this rate they will crowd the streets with them. A man will have to add a clause to his will, “ No statue to be made of me.” It is very offensive to my imagination to see the dying stiffen into statues at this rate. We should wait till their bones begin to crumble — and then avoid too near a likeness to the living. See large flocks, apparently of chip-birds,' rise from the weeds in the garden, now after it clears up. Has the storm driven them from the north? Robins are eat- ing the mountain-ash berries very fast. The robins are . More seen than a fortnight ago. Cistus, some gone to seed and open several days.