15 October 1860 – 21 October 1860

— Channing reads in papers that within a few days a wild- cat was killed in Northampton weighing twenty-two pounds and another in Tyringham, Berkshire County, of thirty-six pounds (of course L. Canadensis both).

P. M. — To White Pond and neighborhoody As a consequence of the different manner in whic trees which have winged seeds and those which have: not are planted, — the [former] being blown together in, one direction by the wind, the latter being dispersed Fy ~— — ate te regularly by animals, —TI observe that the former, as pines (which (the white) are said in the primitive wood to grow in communities), white birches, red maples, alders, etc., often grow in more or less regular rounded or oval or conical patches, as the seeds fell, while oaks, chestnuts, hickories, etc., simply form woods of greater or less extent whether by themselves or mixed; 7. e., they do not naturally spring up in an oval form (or ellip- tical) unless they derive it from the pines under which they were planted. For example, take this young white pine wood half a dozen years old, which has sprung up in a pasture adja- cent to a wood of oaks and pines mixed. It has the form of a broad crescent, or half-moon, with its diameter resting on the old wood near where a large white pine stood. It is true most such groves are early squared by our plows and fences, for we square these circles every day in our rude practice. And in the same manner often they fall in a sprout-land amid oaks, and I, looking from a hilltop, can distinguish in distant old woods still, of pine and oak mixed, these more exclusive and regular communities of pine, a dozen or more rods wide, while it is the oak commonly that fills up the irregular crevices, beside occupying extensive spaces itself. So it happens that, as the pines themselves and their fruit have a more regularly conical outline than deciduous trees, the groves they form also have. Our wood-lots, of course, have a history, and we may often recover it for a hundred years back, though we do . not. A small pine lot may be a side of such an oval, or a half, or a square in the inside with all the curving sides cut off by fences. Yet if we attended more to the history of our lots we should manage them more wisely. Looking round, I observe at a distance an oak wood- lot some twenty years old, with a dense narrow edging of pitch pines about a rod and a half wide and twenty- five or thirty years old along its whole southern side, which is straight and thirty or forty rods long, and, next to it, an open field or pasture. It presents a very singular appearance, because the oak wood is broad and has no pines within it, while the narrow edging is perfectly straight and dense, and pure pme. It is the more re- markable at this season because the oak is all red and yel- low and the pine all green. I understand it and read its history easily before I get to it. I find, as I expected, a fence separating the pines from the oaks, or that they be- long to different owners. I also find, as I expected, that eighteen or twenty years ago a pitch pine wood had stood where the oaks are, and was then cut down, for there are their old stumps. But before they were cut, their seeds were blown into the neighbor’s field, and the little pines came up all along its edge, and they grew so thickly and so fast that that neighbor refrained at last from plowing them up or cutting them off, for just this rod and a half in width, where they were thickest, and moreover, though there are no sizable oaks mixed with these pines, the whole surface even of this narrow strip is as usual completely stocked with little seedling oaks less than a foot high. But I ask, if the neighbor so often lets this narrow edging grow up, why not often, by the same rule, let them spread over the whole of his field? When at length he sees how they have grown, does he not often regret that he did not do so? Or why be dependent, even to this extent, on these windfalls from our neigh- bors’ trees, or an accident? Why not control our own woods and destiny more? (This was north from the lane beyond Conant’s handsome wood.) There are many such problems in forest geometry to be solved. Again, [ read still further back a more varied story. Take the line between Rice and Conant (?) or Gar- field (?). Here is a green strip of dense pitch and white pine some thirty or forty rods long by four wide and thirty years old. On the east side is a large red and yel- low [szc] oak wood-lot, the nearest part of it some dozen or more years old, and on the west a strip three rods wide of little white and pitch pines four to ten feet high that have sprung up in the open land, and next to these is an open field occasionally cultivated. Given these facts, to find the wall. If you think a moment you will know with- out my telling you that it is between the pine wood and the oak. Some dozen or , more years ago there was a large pine | 0 ’ ‘ ’ , 6 § wood extending up to the wall on the ! west, and then an open field belonging y to another man. But, as before, the ; pine seed had blown over the wall and Q ® taken so well that for four rods in 3 width it was suffered to grow, or rather , may be said to have defended itself and , crowded the farmer back (no thanks j to him). But when, some fifteen years ago, the old pine wood was cut by its owner, the other was not ready to cut his younger one. This is now about thirty years old and for many years it has been endeavoring to spread into the open land by its side, as its parents did, but for a long time the proprietor, not taking the hint, blind to his own interests, plowed quite up to the edge of the wood, as I noticed, — and got a few beans for his pains. But the pines (which he did not plant) grew while he slept, and at length, one spring, he gave up the contest and concluded at last to plow only within three rods of the wood, the little pines were so thick and promising. He concluded not to cut his own fingers any more, 2. e. not further than up to the last joint, and hence this second row of little pines. They would have covered the half or perhaps the whole of his barren field before this if he had let them. I examined these pine lots. The strip of little pines contained also a little white birch, much sweet-fern, and thin open sod, but scarcely one oak, and that very small. The strip of large pines contained countless oaks of various kinds, — white, red, black, and shrub oak, — which had come from the young oak lot, many little pines of both kinds, and little wild cherry, — white [sic], —and some hazel and high blueberry. (It was rather elevated as well as dry soil.) I dug up some of the little oaks to see how old they were and how they had fared. The largest in the lot were about one foot high. First, a red or scarlet oak, apparently four years old. The acorn was about one inch below the surface of the pine leaves. It rose five inches above the leaves, and the root extended about one foot below the surface. It had died down once. ™, The second was a black oak which rose six inches above the leaves (or eight, measured along the stem). It was apparently four years old. It was much branched, and its tops had been cut off by rabbits last year. The root ran straight down about one inch, then nearly horizontally five or six inches, and when I pulled it up it broke off where less than one eighth inch thick, at six- teen inches below the surface. This tree was one fourth of an inch in diameter at the surface and nearly three fourths of an inch in diameter at five inches below (along the root). At the same height above the surface it was hardly one fifth of an inch in diameter. The third was a white oak ten inches high, appar- ently seven years old. It also had been browsed by a rabbit and put out a new shoot accordingly. Two years’ growth was buried in the leaves. The root was very similar, both in direction and form, to the last, only not quite so thick. Fourth, a shrub oak also quite similar, though less thick still and with two or more shoots from one stock. In all these cases, or especially the first three [ ? ], there was one main, and an unexpectedly great, fusiform root, altogether out of proportion to the top, you would say, tapering both ways, but of course largest and sharpest downward, with many fine stringy fibres extending on every side from it perhaps a foot. Just as a biennial plant devotes its energies the first year to producing a stock on which it can feed the next, so these little oaks in their earliest years are forming great fusiform vigor- ous roots on which they can draw when they are sud- denly left to seek their fortunes in a sprout-land. Thus this double forest was advancing to conquer new (or old) land, sending forward their children on the wings of the wind, while already the oak seedlings from the oak wood behind had established themselves beneath the old pines ready to supplant them. The pines were the vanguard. They stood up to fire with their children before them, while the little oaks kneeled behind and between them. The pine is the pioneer, the oak the more permanent settler who lays out his im- provements. Pines are by some considered lower in the scale of trees—in the orderof development — than oaks. While the pines were blowing into the pasture from this narrow edging, the animals were planting the acorns under the pines. Even the small pine woods are thus perfectly equipped. There was even under these dark, dense pines, thirty years old, a pretty thick bed of blueberry and huckle- berry bushes next the wall, ten feet wide, the relics of a still denser and higher one that grew there when it was an open field. ‘The former had thus been driven back three times, first by the blueberry hedge, then by the pines of thirty years ago, and lastly by the young pines that sprang from them. ‘Thus a wood-lot had been forced upon him, and yet perhaps he will talk of it as a creation of his own. I have come up here this afternoon to see ’s dense white pine lot beyond the pond, that was cut off last winter, to know how the little oaks look in it. To my surprise and chagrin, I find that the fellow who calls himself its owner has burned it all over and sowed winter-rye here. He, no doubt, means to let it grow up ~, again in a year or two, but he thought it would be clear gain if he could extract a little rye from it in the mean- while. What a fool! Here nature had got everything ready for this emergency, and kept them ready for many years, — oaks half a dozen years old or more, with fusi- form roots full charged and tops already pointing sky- ward, only waiting to be touched off by the sun, — and he thought he knew better, and would get a little rye out of it first, which he could feel at once between his fingers, and so he burned it, and dragged his harrow over it. As if oaks would bide his time or come at his bidding. Or as if he preferred to have a pine or a birch wood here possibly half a century hence — for the land is “pine sick ” — rather than an oak wood at once. So he trifles with nature. I am chagrined for him. That he should call himself an agriculturalist! He needs to have a guardian placed over him. A forest-warden should be appointed by the town. Overseers of poor husband- men. He has got his dollars for the pine timber, and now he wishes to get his bushels of grain and finger the dol- lars that they will bring; and then, Nature, you may have your way again. Let us purchase a mass for his soul. A greediness that defeats its own ends. T examined a little lot of his about a dozen rods square just this side, cut off last winter, apparently two thirds white pine and one third white oak. Last year the white pine seed was very abundant, but there was little or no white oak seed. Accordingly I noticed twenty or more seedling white pines of this year on the barest spots, but not a single seedling oak. This suggests how much the species of the succeeding forest may depend on whether the trees were fertile the year before they were cut, or not. I see a very large white oak acorn which has a double meat with a skin between. There is a very young grub in it. They appear to be last year’s hemlock and larch cones that still hold on in great numbers! As time elapses, and the resources from which our forests have been supplied fail, we shall of necessity be more and more convinced of the significance of the seed. I see in a thick pitch pine wood half a dozen stout pine twigs five eighths of an inch thick that have been gnawed off with their plumes. Why? Hear the alder locust still. Robins apparently more numerous than a month ago. See grackles in corn- fields in two places to-day. It chanced that here were two proprietors within half a mile who had done exactly the same, 7. e., accepted part of a wood-lot that was forced on them, and I have no doubt that there are several more exactly similar cases within that half-mile diameter. The history of a wood-lot is often, if not commonly, here, a history of cross-purposes, — of steady and con- sistent endeavor on the part of Nature, of interference and blundering with a glimmering of intelligence at the eleventh hour on the part of the proprietor. The pro- prietor of wood-lots commonly treats Nature as an Irishman drives a horse, — by standing before him and beating him in the face all the way across a field. If I find any starved pasture in the midst of our woods, — and I remember many such, and they are ™~, the least valuable tracts we have, — I know that it has commonly had such a history as this wood-lot (above). It was burned over when cut, and perhaps cultivated a year or two, often because the owner thought it was what the soil needed in order that it might produce trees. In some cases there may be sense in such a course if he can afford to wait a century instead of a third of that time for a crop. It depends on what the trees are, the local- ity, etc. But commonly the owner who adopts this course makes a move in the dark and in ninety-nine cases in a hundred [an indecipherable word] his own fingers. The time will soon come, if it has not already, when we shall have to take special pains to secure and encour- age the growth of white oaks, as we already must that of chestnuts for the most part. These oaks will become so scattered that there will be not seed enough to seed the ground rapidly and completely. Horace Mann tells me that he found in the crop or inside of the stake-driver killed the other day one grass- hopper, several thousand-legs one to one and a half inches long, and not much else. It commonly happens in settled countries like this that the new community of pines, sprung from seeds blown off from an older one, is very youthful compared with the trees it sprang from because many successive crops of trees or seeds have been plowed up or cut before the owner allowed Nature to take her course. Naturally the pines spread more steadily and with no such abrupt descents. In the wildwood at least there are commonly only fires and insects or blight, and not the axe and plow and the cattle, to interrupt the regular progress of things.

P. M. — To Walden Woods. The trees which with us grow in masses, 1. e. not merely scattering, are: — 1, 2. White and pitch pine Oaks White birch Red maple . Chestnut . Hickory Alder Hemlock, spruce, and larch Cedar (white and red) Willow Locust Apple Red cherry (in neighboring towns) W. [sic] Sugar maple (rare)

P. M. — To Merriam’s white pine grove. I often see amid or beside a pitch or white pine grove, though thirty years old, a few yet larger and older trees, from which they came, rising above them, like patri- archs surrounded by their children. Early cinquefoil again. I find fair-looking white oak acorns, which abound on the trees near Beck Stow’s, to be decayed on the tree. Wishing to see what proportion were decayed I pull down a bough, and pluck forty-one acorns, which I cut open successively with my knife. Every one is soft and spoiled, turned black or dark-brown within, though there is not a single worm in them. Indeed, abundant and beautiful as the crop is, they are all decayed on that and the neighboring trees, and I only find one sound one after long search. ‘This is probably the reason why they hold on still so numerously, and beside the squir- rels do not disturb them. I suspect that they were killed by the severe frost of about October Ist. Abundant as the crop is, perhaps half of them have already been destroyed thus. Those that were touched first and most severely are paler-brown on one or both sides. Here, or on these trees, is a whole crop destroyed before it fell, though remarkably abundant. How many thousand bushels there must be in this state in this town! See how an acorn is planted by a squirrel, just under a loose covering of moist leaves where it is shaded and concealed, and lies on its side on the soil, ready to send down its radicle next year. If there are not so many oak seedlings in a deciduous wood as in a pine one, it may be because both oaks (and acorns) and squirrels love warmth. The ground does not freeze nearly so hard under dense pines as in a deciduous wood. Look through an oak wood, say twenty-five or thirty years old, north of the Sherman grove on the road. It appeared to me that there were fewer seedling oaks under this than under pines, and the roots of the other little ones that looked like seedlings were old and decay- ing, and the shoots slender, feeble, and more or less prostrate under the leaves. You will find seedling oaks under oaks, it is true, but I think that you will not find a great many of them. You will not find, as under pines, a great many of these little oaks one to eight or ten years old, with great fat, or fusiform, roots, all ready to spring up when the pines are cut. If it were true that the little oaks under oaks steadily grew and came to trees there, then even that would be a reason why the soil would not be so well stocked with them when the wood was cut as when a pine wood is cut, for there would be only ten trees in the first case to one hundred in the last (according to our calculation before). Most of the little oaks here were little or dwarfed, apparently because they were shoots from poor and diseased rootstocks, which were common in the ground. But I think that neither pines nor oaks do well under older trees. Methinks you do not see numerous oaks of all ages and sizes in an old oak wood, but commonly large trees of about the same age and little ones like huckleberry bushes under your feet; and so commonly with pine woods. In either case, if the woods are well grown and dense, all the trees in them appear to have been planted at the same time. For aught that I know, I would much rather have a young oak wood which has succeeded to pines than one that has succeeded to oaks, for they will make better trees, not only because the soil is new to them, but because they are all seedlings, while in the other case far the greater part are sprouts; just as I would prefer apple trees five or six years from the seed for my orchard to suckers from those which have come to maturity or decayed. Otherwise your young oaks will soon, when half grown, have the diseases of old trees, — warts and decay. I find that Merriam’s white pine grove is on the site of an oak wood, the old oak stumps being still very common. ‘The pines appear to be some forty years old. The soil of pine leaves is an inch to an inch and a half thick. The oldest little oaks here are five years old and six inches high. Am surprised to see that the pasture west of this, where the little pitch pines were cut down last year, is now even more generally green with pines than two years ago. What shall we say to that management that halts between two courses, — does neither this nor that, but botches both? I see many a pasture on which the pitch or white pines are spreading, where the bush-whack is from time to time used with a show of vigor, and I despair of my trees,—I say mine, for the farmer - evidently does not mean they shall be his, — and yet — this questionable work is so poorly done that those very fields grow steadily greener and more forest-like from year to year in spite of cows and bush-whack, till at length the farmer gives up the contest from sheer weariness, and finds himself the owner of a wood-lot. Now whether wood-lots or pastures are most profitable for him I will not undertake to say, but I am certain that a wood-lot and pasture combined is not profitable. I see spatter-dock pads and pontederia in that little pool at south end of Beck Stow’s. How did they get there? There is no stream in this case? It was perhaps rather reptiles and birds than fishes, then. Indeed we might as well ask how they got anywhere, for all the pools and fields have been stocked thus, and we are not to suppose as many new creations as pools. This suggests to inquire how any plant came where it is, — how, for instance, the pools which were stocked with lilies before we were born or this town was settled, and ages ago, were so stocked, as well as those which we dug. I think that we are warranted only in supposing that the former was stocked in the same way as the latter, and that there was not a sudden new creation, — at least since the first; yet I have no doubt that peculiar- ities more or less considerable have thus been gradually produced in the lilies thus planted in various pools, in consequence of their various conditions, though they all came originally from one seed. We find ourselves in a world that is already planted, but is also still being planted as at first. We say of some plants that they grow in wet places and of others that they grow in desert places. The truth is that their seeds are scattered almost everywhere, but here only do they succeed. Unless you can show me the pool where the lily was created, I shall believe that the oldest fossil ™~ lilies which the geologist has detected (if this is found fossil) originated in that locality in a similar manner to these of Beck Stow’s. We see thus how the fossil lilies which the geologist has detected are dispersed, as well as these which we carry in our hands to church. The development theory implies a greater vital force in nature, because it is more flexible and accommodat- ing, and equivalent to a sort of constant new creation. Mr. Alcott tells me that the red squirrels which live in his elms go off to the woods (pitch pines behind his house) about June, and return in September, when the butternuts, etc., are ripe. Do they not go off for hazel- nuts and pine seed? No doubt they are to be found where their food is. Young oaks, especially white oaks, in open woodland hollows and on plains [are] almost annually killed down by frost, they are so tender. Large tracts in this town are bare for this reason. Hence it is very important that the little oaks, when they are tenderest, should have the shelter of pines and other trees as long as they can bear it, or perhaps till they get above the level of the frosts. I know of extensive open areas in the woods where it would be of no use to sow acorns or to set seedling oaks, for every one would be killed by the frost, as they have already been; but if you were to plant pines thinly there, or thickly at first and then thin them out, you could easily raise oaks, for often you have only got to protect them till they are five or six feet high, that they may be out of the way of ordinary frosts, whose surface is as . level as that of a lake. According to Loudon (vide Emerson on oaks), the best authorities say plant some two hundred and fifty acorns to an acre (2. e. some from three hundred to five hundred, others from sixty to one hundred), or about one and one half acorns to a rod, or two hundred and forty to an acre. In my walk in Walden Woods yesterday I found that the seedling oaks and chestnuts were most common under the fullest and densest white pines, as that of Brister Spring.

E. Hosmer tells me to-day that while digging mud at the Pokelogan the other day he found several fresh acorns planted an inch or two deep under the grass just outside the oaks and bushes there. Almost every observant farmer finds one such deposit each year. If that Merriam lot is fifteen rods square, then, instead of there being no oaks in it, there are some twenty-five hundred oaks in it, or far more oaks than pines, — say five times as many, for there are probably not nearly five hundred pines in the lot. This is only one of the thousand cases in which the proprietor and woodchopper tell you that there is not a single oak in the lot. So the tables were turned, and, so far as numbers were con- cerned, it would have been truer to say that this was an exclusively oak wood and that there were no pines in it. Truly appearances are deceptive. P. M. — To Walden Woods to examine old stumps. In Trillium Wood the trees are chiefly pine, and I judge them to be forty to fifty years old, though there are not a few oaks, etc. Beneath them I find some old pitch pine stumps and one white pine. ‘They would not be seen by a careless observer; they are indistinct mounds and preserve no form nor marks of the axe. This is low ground. Part of the cores, etc., of the stumps are, nevertheless, preserved by fat. I then look at Farrar’s [ ?] hill lot east of the Deep Cut. This is oak, cut, as I remember, some twenty-five years ago, the trees say five to eight inches [in] diameter. I find beneath the oaks innumerable pitch pine stumps, well preserved, or rather, distinct, some of them two feet and more in diameter, with bark nearly three inches thick at the ground, but generally fifteen inches in diameter. Though apparently thoroughly rotten and of a rough (crumbly) conical form and more or less covered with fine moss (hypnum), they were firm within on account of the fat in flakes on the whole core, and frequently showed the trace of the axe in the middle. I could get cartloads of fat pine there now, often lifting out with my hands the whole core, aclear mass of yellow fat. When the stump was almost a mere mound mossed over, breaking off an inch or two deep of the crust, with the moss, I could still trace on one side the straight edge made by the axe. There were also, especially on the lower, or northern, side, some large oak stumps, no doubt of the same age. “\ These were much better preserved than the pines, — at least the part above ground. ‘The whole shape and almost every stroke of the axe apparent sometimes, as in a fresh stump. I counted from seventy to seventy-five rings on one. The present wood appears to be chiefly from the seed, with some sprouts. The latter two or more close together, with the old stump more or less overgrown. The sprouts, I think, were from small trees. (Methinks you do not see trees which have sprouted from old or large stumps two or three feet in diameter. I doubt if a very old wood, like E. Hubbard’s, would send up sprouts from the stump.) I saw one large oak stump so much decayed that it may have belonged toa generation further back. I next examined Ebby Hubbard’s old oak and pine wood. ‘The trees may be a hundred years old. The older or decaying trees have been cut out from time to time, neglecting these more recent stumps. ‘The very oldest evidences of a tree were a hollow three or four feet across, in which you often slumped, —a hollow place in which squirrels have their holes covered with many layers of leaves, and perhaps with young oaks springing up in it, for the acorns rolled into it. But if you dug there, from under the moss (there was com- monly a little green moss around it) and leaves and soil, in the midst of the virgin mould which the tree had turned to, you pulled up flakes and shoulder-blades of wood that might still be recognized for oak, portions preserved by some quality which they concentrated, like the fat leaves or veins of the pine, — the oak of oak. But for the most part it was but the mould and mildew of the grave, — the grave of a tree which was cut or died eighty or a hundred years ago there. It is with the graves of trees as with those of men, — at first an upright stump (for a monument), in course of time a mere mound, and finally, when the corpse has decayed and shrunk, a depression in the soil. In such a hollow it is better to plant a pine than an oak. The only other ancient traces of trees were perhaps the semiconical mounds which had been heaved up by trees which fell in some hurricane. I saw where Ebby had tried a pitch pine with his axe, though there was not a green twig on it, and the wood- peckers had bored it from top to bottom, — effectually proved it, if he had not been blind. Looked at that pitch and white pine wood just east of Close at Brister Spring, which I remember as pas- ture some thirty years ago. The pasture is still betrayed under the pines by the firmer, sward-like surface, there being fewer leaves and less of leafy mould formed, — less virgin soil, —and by the patches of green (pine) moss and white cladonia peeping out here and there. Young chestnuts (I dig up three or four) have not the large roots that oaks have. . I see the acorn after the tree is five or six years old. Brassica Napus, or rape, a second crop, is blooming now, especially where grain has been cut and the field laid down to grass and clover. It has there little slender plants; rough, or bristly, lower leaves. Ist. There is the primitive wood, woodland which was woodland when the township was settled, and which has not been cut at all. Of this I know of none in Con- cord. Where is the nearest? There is, perhaps, a large tract in Winchendon. 2d. Second growth, the woodland which has been cut but once, — true second growth. This country has been so recently settled that a large part of the older States is covered now with this second growth, and the same name is occasionally still applied, though falsely, to those wood-lots which have been cut twice or many more times. Of this second growth I think that we have con- siderable left, and I remember much more. These are our forests which contain the largest and oldest trees, — shingle pines (very few indeed left) and oak timber. 3d. Primitive woodland, 2. e., which has always been woodland, never cultivated or converted into pasture or grain-field, nor burned over intentionally. Of two kinds, first, that which has only been thinned from time to time, and secondly, that which has been cut clean many times over. A larger copsewood. 4th. Woodland which has been cleared one or more times, enough to raise a crop of grain on it, burned over and perhaps harrowed or even plowed, and suffered to grow up again in a year or two. Call this “interrupted woodland” or “tamed.” 5th. New woods, or which have sprung up de novo on land which has been cultivated or cleared long enough to kill all the roots in it. (The 3d, 4th, and 5th are a kind of copsewood.) 6th. Artificial woods, or those which have been set out or raised from the seed, artificially. It happens that we have not begun to set out and plant till all the primitive wood is gone. All the new woods (or 5th kind) whose beginning I can (now) remember are pine or birch (maple, etc., I have not noticed enough). I suspect that the greater part (?) of our woodland is the 3d kind, or primitive woodland, never burned over in- tentionally nor plowed, though much of it is the 4th kind. Probably almost all the large wood cut ten or fifteen years ago (and since) here was second growth, and most that we had left was cut then. Of the new woods I remember the beginning of E. Hubbard’s east of Brister Spring; Bear Garden, pitch pine; Wheeler’s pigeon-place, pitch pine; also his blackberry-field, pitch pine and a few white; West Fair Haven Spring woods, pitch pine and white; E. Hubbard’s Close Mound, pitch pine; Conantum-top, pitch pine; Mason’s pasture (?), white pine; behind Baker’s (? ), pitch pine; my field at Walden, pitch pine; Kettle Hill, pitch pine; Moore’s corn-hill, pitch pine, cut say °59; behind Moore’s house (??), pitch pine (was it new?); front of Sleepy Hollow, poplars, pitch pine; E. Wood’s, front of Colburn place (??), pitch pine, not new wood; John Hosmer’s, beyond house (?), pitch pine; Fair Haven Hill-side, white pine, just begun; Merriam’s pasture, beyond Beck Stow’s, just begun, pitch pine; old coast behind Heywood’s, pitch pine; Conant’s white pine crescent in front of W. Wheeler’s; J. P. Brown pasture, white pine; at Hem- locks, pitch pine; northwest of Assabet stone bridge, pitch pine; ‘Tarbell’s pitch pines; Baker’s, above beech, pitch pine; Henry Shattuck’s, pitch pine; northwest of Farmer’s, pitch pine; William Brown’s, pitch pine; north of H. Shattuck’s, pitch pine; white and pitch pine south of Rice’s lot; pitch pine northwest of old Corner schoolhouse, pitch pine southeast of new Corner schoolhouse; large pitch pine hill behind Hagar’s in Lincoln. In several of these new woods — pitch pine and birches — can see the old corn-hills still. The woods within my recollection have gradually withdrawn further from the village, and woody capes which jutted from the forest toward the town are now cut off and separated by cleared land behind. The Irish have also made irruptions into our woods in several places, and cleared land. Edmund Hosmer tells me of a gray squirrel which he kept in his old (Everett) house; that he would go off to the woods every summer, and in the winter come back and into his cage, where he whirled the wire cylinder. He would be surprised to see it take a whole and large ear of corn and run out a broken window and up over the roof of the corn-barn with it, and also up the elms. We have a kitten a third grown which often carries its tail almost flat on its back like a squirrel.