Dr. [Charles L.] A[nderson] said that the anthers of the swamp vaccinium were awned. I find them not so—& the styles hairy—which would put it with the uliginosum!! section. He has a rattlesnake—another much larger light brown snake found on the prairie (Thoreau’s Minnesota Journey, 18-19).

  He tells his mother that you and he are having a fine time.

  The West opens a new field for his observations; and to one whose everyday walk was an expedition into some unexplored region of Concord in search of novelties, though his track had been taken but yesterday, that wilderness must have surprising attractions . . .

  I know not to whom that wild country belongs if not to this old explorer, and think it has waited with an Amazonian patience for his arrival . . . his visit must have been predestined from the beginning, and this lassitude of these late months only the intimation of his having exhausted these old fields and farms of Concord of the significance they had for him.