I am surprised to find the brook and ditches in Hubbard’s Close remarkably full after this long drought, when so many streams are dried up. Rice and others are getting out mud in the pond-hole opposite Breed’s. They have cut down straight through clear black muck, perfectly rotted, eight feet, and it is soft yet further. Button-bushes, andromeda, proserpinaca, hardhack, etc., etc., grow atop. It looks like a great sponge. Old trees buried in it. On the Walden road some maples are yellow and some chestnuts brownish-yellow and also sere . . .  As I go up Pine Hill, gather the shrivelled Vaccinium vacillans berries, many and good, and not wormy like huckleberries. Far and more abundant in this state than usual, owing to the drought . . .