P. M.—To Cliffs. I hear Lincoln bell tolling for church . . . A cloudy, misty day with rain more or less steady. This gentle rain is fast loosening the leaves,—I see them filling the air at the least puff,—and it is also flattening down the layer which has already fallen. The pines on Fair Haven have shed nearly all their leaves. Butter-and-eggs still blooms. Barrels of apples lie under the trees. The Smiths have carried their last load of peaches to market. To-day no part of the heavens is so clear and bright as Fair Haven Pond and the river . . .

  Minott calls the stake-driver “belcher-squelcher.” Says he has seen them when making the noise. They go slug-toot, slug-toot, slug-toot. Told me of his hunting gray squirrels with old Colonel Brooks’s hound. How the latter came into the yard one day, and he spoke to him, patted him, went into the house, took down his gun marked London, thought he would go a-squirrel-hunting. Went over among the ledges, away from Brooks’s, for Tige had a dreadful strong voice and could be heard as far as a cannon, and he was plaguy [?] afraid Brooks would hear him. How Tige treed them on the oaks on the plain below the Cliffs. He could tell by his bark when he had treed one; he never told a lie. And so he got six or seven. How Tige told him from a distance that he had got one, but when he came up he could see nothing; but still he knew that Tige never told a lie, and at length he saw his head, in a crotch high up in the top of a very tall oak, and though he didn’t expect to get him, he knocked him over.