Will you please give us an answer—and your subject—if you consent to come—by Mr. Charles Bowers, who is to lecture here tomorrow evening. [MS torn]

  Respectfully yours

  W. Cushing

  Chairman Ex. Com^tee

M M E [Mary Moody Emerson] & Henry James are both proficients, & C. K N., [Charles King Newcomb] H. D. T., & W. E. C. [William Ellery Channing]

  He belongs to the Homeric age, and is older than fields and gardens; as virile and talented as Homer’s heroes, and the elements. He seems alone, of all the men I have known, to be a native New Englander,—as much so as the oak, or granite ledge; and I would rather send him to London or Vienna or Berlin, as a specimen of American genius spontaneous and unmixed, than anyone else. I shall have occasion to use him presently in these portraits. We must grind him into paint to help brown and invigorate Channing’s profile, when we come to it. Here is coloring for half a dozen Socialisms. It stands out in layers and clots, like carbuncles, to give force and homeliness to the otherwise feminine lineaments. This man is the independent of independents—is, indeed, the sole signer of the Declaration, and a Revolution in himself—a more than ’76—having got beyond the signing to the doing it our fully. Concord jail could not keep him safely; Justice Hoar paid his tax, too; and was glad to forget thereafter, till now, his citizenship, and omit his existence, as a resident, in the poll list. Lately he has taken to surveying as well as authorship, and make the compass pay for his book on “The Concord and Merrimac Rivers,” which the public is slow to take off his hands. I went with him to the publishers, Monroe and Co., and learned that only about two hundred of an edition of a thousand were sold. But author and book can well afford to wait.

For ourselves, we were content to receive it for what it was—a most original, quaint, humorous, lifelike and entertaining description of Cape Cod and its inhabitants, and we care not whether it comes under the denomination of lecture, sketch, travels, or fish story! Nor do we think it without instruction. We shall certainly never think of Cape Cod without recalling images of rocky shores, and their ghastly dead, its desert beaches, its masculine women, and its verten wreckers. Cape Cod is no longer blank on our mental map. Its natural features and its inhabitants are pictured there, and we have added so much to our knowledge of “men and things.”

. . .

The merry and well preserved old man they met there, his “good for nothing critter” of a wife, with whom he had lived 64 years, her aged daughter, the boy, and the fool; the old man’s rambling and unceasing talk, the scene at the breakfast table, recalling the laughable one between Johnson and Boswell at the inn; the story of the calm, and the scraps of information thrown scatteringly in,—all these were worth telling could we give them in the tone and manner of the lecturer. But as we cannot, we pause.

  I return by the bearer De Laet’s “Novus Orbis” &c. Will you please send me Alfred Hawkins’ “Picture of Quebec” and “Silliman’s Tour of Quebec”?

  If these are not in—then Wytfliet’s “Descriptionis Ptolemaicae Argumentum &c and Lescarbot “Les Muses de la Nouvelle France.”

  Yrs respectly

  Henry D. Thoreau

  It is proposed that a meeting of the Class of 1837 be held at the Revere House, on Wednesday, at 5 P.M., on the 19th of March next.

  There are reasons for a deviation from the usual custom of the Class in assembling during the week of the annual Commencement.

  In Boston and its vicinity are now collected a larger number of the Class than at any time since we left the University. A general desire has been expressed to take advantage of this circumstance, and to endeavor to re-awaken the interest natural to those who have been pleasantly associated together at an early period of life. Nearly fourteen years have elapsed since we left Cambridge, and but few have been in situations to bring them much into contact with any considerable number of their Class.

  There is a manifest advantage in holding a meeting at this season of the year. Upon Commencement week, other engagements are liable to interfere, and the usual heat and fatigue of the days preclude any long duration of the meeting either in the afternoon or evening.

  On the present occasion a dinner is proposed of which the expense will not exceed one dollar to each person.

  It is desirable that a definite answer to this letter should be returned to the Committee previous to the 17th inst. If circumstances should compel the absence of any member, it is expected that he will contribute to the interest of the occasion by writing some account of himself since he left College.

  Very truly,

  Your friends and Classmates,

  William W[hitwell]. Greenough ⎫

  William J[ohnson]. Dale, ⎬ Class Committee

  David Greene Haskins, ⎪

  J[oseph]. H[enry]. Adams, Jr. ⎭

  Annexed is a list of the members of the Class supposed to be in this vicinity.

  [William] Allen, Greenough, [James] Richardson,

  [John] Bacon, Haskins, [Charles Theodore] Russell,

  [Clifford] Belcher, [William] Hawes, Thoreau,

  [Henry Jacob] Bigelow, [Christopher Columbus] Holmes, 2d. [John Francis] Tuckerman,

  [Harvey Erastus] Clap, [Henry] Hubbard, [Henry] Vose,

  [Manlius Stimson] Clarke, [Benjamin Gage] Kimball, [John] Weiss,

  Dale, [John F. W.] Lane, [Giles Henry] Whitney,

  [Charles Henry] Dall, [Charles Wainwright] March, [Daniel] Wight,

  [William] Davis, 1st. [August Goddard] Peabody, Williams, 1st.

  [William Augustus] Davis, 2d. [Amos] Perry, Williams, 3d.

  [Richard Henry] Dana, [Francis] Phelps

  When I have been asked to speak at a temperance meeting, my answer has been, “I am too transcendental to serve you in your way.” They would fain confine me to the rum-sellers and rum-drinkers, of whom I am not one, and whom I know little about.

  As I entered the Deep Cut, I was affected by beholding the first faint reflection of genuine and unmixed moonlight on the eastern sand-bank while the horizon, yet red with day, was tingeing the western side.

  Finds runaway sailors on the Chonos Archipelago, who he thought “had kept a very good reckoning of time, “having lost only four days in fifteen months.Near same place, on the islands of the archipelago, he found wild potato, the tallest four feet high, tubers generally small but one two inches in diameter; “resembled in every respect, and had the same smell as English potatoes; but when boiled they shrunk much, and were watery and insipid, without any bitter taste.”

  Speaking of the surf on the coast of Chiloe, “I was assured that, after a heavy gale, the roar can be heard at night even at Castro, a distance of no less than twenty-one sea-miles, across a hilly and wooded country.

  10 A.M.—The white lily has opened . . . I now return through Conant’s leafy woods by the spring, whose floor is sprinkled with sunlight,—low trees which yet effectually shade you . . . 8.30 P.M.—The streets of the village are much more interesting to me at this hour of a summer evening than by day. Neighbors, and also farmers, come a-shopping after their day’s haying, are chatting in the streets, and I hear the sound of many musical instruments and of singing from various houses.

  “The blue-eyed Walden there doth smile

  Most tenderly upon its neighbour pines.”

  Thoreau read me some passages from his paper on “Walking” as I passed the evening with him, and slept at Emerson’s again afterwards.

  Cnicus pumilus, pasture thistle. How many insects a single one attracts! While you sit by it, bee after bee will visit it, and busy himself probing for honey and loading himself with pollen, regardless of your overshadowing presence. He sees its purple flower from afar, and that use there is in its color.

  Oxalis stricta, upright wood-sorrel, the little yellow ternate-leaved flower in pastures and corn-fields.

  Sagittaria sagittif olia, or arrowhead. It has very little root that I can find to eat.

  Campanula crinoides, var. 2nd, slender bellflower, vine-like like a galium, by brook-side in Depot Field.

  Impatiens, noli-me-tangere, or touch-me-not, with its dangling yellow pitchers or horns of plenty, which I have seen for a month by damp causeway thickets, but the whole plant was so tender and drooped so soon I could not get it home.

  May I love and revere myself above all the gods that men have ever invented. May I never let the vestal fire go out in my recesses.

  The lines “Lately, alas, I knew a gentle boy” are suffused with a sweet elegiac tenderness, as if the woods and fields bewailed the loss of their foraging friend and essayed to sing their grief in their murmuring leaves. So the essay on “Friendship” wears a sylvan sympathetic manner, and carries a heart of oak in its bosom—so brave, so self-helpful, so defiant, and yet so sternly kind and wholesome in its counsels. No man lives in so close a companionship and so constant with Nature, or breathes more of the spirit of pure poetry. And in this lies his excellence; for when the heart is divorced from Nature, from the society of living, moving things, poetry has fled, and the love that sings.

  P.M.—To Marlborough Road via Clamshell Hill, Jenny Dugan’s, Round Pond, Canoe Birch Road (Deacon Dakin’s), and White Pond . . . Gathered our first watermelon to-day.

  In witness whereof we have hereunto set our hands this first day of September in this year eighteen hundred and fifty one. John S. Keyes, [John Shepard Keyes] A. G. Fay, [Addison G. Fay] Selectmen of Concord.

  The skunk-cabbage’s checkered fruit (spadix), one three inches long; all parts of the flower but the anthers left and enlarged. Bidens cernua, or nodding burrmarigold, like a small sunflower (with rays) in Heywood Brook, i.e. beggar-tick. Bidens connata (?), without rays, in Hubbard’s Meadow. Blue-eyed grass still. Drooping neottia very common. I see some yellow butterflies and others occasionally and singly only. The smilax berries are mostly turned dark. I started a great bittern from the weeds at the swimming-place.

  The dry grass yields a crisped sound to my feet. The white oak which appears to have made part of a hedge fence once, now standing in Hubbard’s fence near the Corner road, where it stretches along horizontally, is (one of its arms, for it has one running each way) two and a half feet thick, with a sprout growing perpendicularly out of it eighteen inches in diameter. The corn-stalks standing in stacks, in long rows along the edges of the corn-fields, remind me of stacks of muskets.

  Also it was decided, as soon as convenient, to move the stone on the bank of the river to a point by the road leading to the powder mills, and on a straight line between the nearest bound stones.

  All to the satisfaction of both parties, this fifteenth day of September 1851. A. A. Kelsey, Henry D. Thoreau , (In behalf of Concord); Ivory Keyes, Luther Conant, (Selectmen of Acton).

  Yesterday and to-day the stronger winds of autumn have begun to blow, and the telegraph harp has sounded loudly. I heard it especially in the Deep Cut this afternoon, the tone varying with the tension of different parts of the wire. The sound proceeds from near the posts, where the vibration is apparently more rapid. I put my ear to one of the posts, and it seemed to me as if every pore of the wood was filled with music, labored with the strain,—as if every fiber was affected and being seasoned or timed, rearranged according to a new and more harmonious law.

  It is a cool and windy morning, and I have donned a thick coat for a walk. The wind is from the north, so that the telegraph harp does not sound where I cross. This windy autumnal weather is very exciting and bracing, clear and cold, after the rain of yesterday, it having cleared off in the night. I see a small hawk, a pigeon (?) hawk, over the Depot Field, which can hardly fly against the wind. At Hubbard’s Grove the wind roars loudly in the woods. Grapes are ripe and already shrivelled by frost; barberries also. It is cattle-show day at Lowell.

  Yesterday’s wind and rain has strewn the ground with leaves, especially under the apple trees. Rain coming after frost seems to loosen the hold of the leaves, making them rot off. Saw a woodchuck disappearing in his hole. The river washes up-stream before the wind, with white streaks of foam on its dark surface, diagonally to its course, showing the direction of the wind. Its surface, reflecting the sun, is dazzlingly bright. The outlines of the hills are remarkably distinct and firm, and their surfaces bare and hard, not clothed with a thick air. I notice one red tree, a red maple, against the green woodside in Conant’s meadow. It is a far brighter red than the blossoms of any tree in summer and more conspicuous. The huckleberry bushes on Conantum are all turned red . . .

  In Cohush Swamp the sumach leave have turned a very deep red, but have not lost their fragrance. I notice wild apples growing luxuriantly in the midst of the swamp, rising red over the colored, painted leaves of sumach, and reminding me that they were ripened and colored by the same influences,—some green, some yellow, some red, like the leaves.

  Fell in with a man whose breath smelled of spirit which he had drunk. How could I but feel that it was his own spirit that I smelt? Behind Miles’s, Darius Miles’s, that was, I asked an Irishman how many potatoes he could dig in a day, wishing to know how well they yielded. “Well, I don’t keep any account,” he answered; “I scratch away, and let the day’s work praise itself.” . . .

  I perceive from the hill behind Lee’s that much of the river meadows is not cut, though they have been very dry . . .

  At Clematis Brook I perceive that the pods or follicles of the Asclepias Syriaca now point upward . . .

  On Mt. Misery some very rich yellow leaves—clear yellow—of the Populus grandidentata, which still love to way, and tremble in my hands . . .

  Get home at noon.

  At sundown the wind has all gone down.

  2 P.M.—Rowed down the river to Ball’s Hill . . . The river is so low that, off N. Barrett’s shore, some low islands are exposed, covered with a green grass like mildew . . . From Ball’s Hill the Great Meadows, now smoothly shorn, have a quite imposing appearance, so spacious and level . . .

  2 P. M.—To Conantum.

  A warm, damp, mistling day, without much wind. The white pines in Hubbard’s Grove have now a pretty distinct parti-colored look,—green and yellow mottled,—reminding me of some plants like the milkweed, expanding with maturity and pushing off their downy seeds . . . Sitting by the spruce swamp in Conant’s Grove, I am reminded that this is a perfect day to visit the swamps, with its damp, mistling, mildewy air, so solemnly still . . .

  Here was a large hornets’ nest, which when I went to take and first knocked on it to see if anybody was at home, out came the whole swarm upon me lively enough. I do not know why they should linger longer than their fellows whom I saw the other day, unless because the swamp is warmer. They were all within and not working, however. I picked up two arrowheads in the field beyond . . . The mist has now thickened into a fine rian, and I retreat.

  Found Hosmer carting out manure from under his barn to make room for the winter. He said he was tired of farming, he was too old. Quoted Webster as saying that he had never eaten the bread of idleness for a single day, and thought that Lord Brougham might have said as much with truth while he was in the opposition, but he did not know that he could say as much of himself. However, he did not wish to be idle, he merely wished to rest. Looked on Walden from the hill with the sawed pine stump on the north side.

  The slave said he could guide himself by many other stars than the north star, whose rising and setting he knew. They steered for the north star even when it had got round and appeared to them to be in the south. They frequently followed the telegraph where there was no railroad. The slaves bring many superstitions from Africa. The fugitives sometimes superstitiously carry a turf in their hats, thinking that their success depends on it . . .

  Candle-light.—To Conantum. The moon not quite half full . . . At 8 o’clock the fogs have begun, which, with the low half-moon shining on them, look like cobwebs or thin white veils spread over the earth.

  8 P. M.—To Cliffs. Moon three-quarters full.

  George Tatcher, having searched an hour in vain this morning to find a frog, caught a pickerel with a mullein leaf . . .

  7.30 P. M.—To Fair Haven Pond by boat, the moon four fifths full, not a cloud in the sky: paddling all the way . . . Home at ten.

  2 P. M.—To the Marlborough road. This day is very warm, yet not bright like the last, but hazy. Picked up an Indian gouge on Dennis’s Hill . . . By the side of J. P. Brown’s grain-field I picked up some white oak acorns in the path by the wood-side, which I found to be unexpectedly sweet and palatable, the bitterness being scarcely perceptible . . .

  The farmers are ditching,—redeeming more meadow,—getting corn, collecting their apples, threshing, etc . . . This warm day is a godsend to the wasps. I see them buzzing about the broken windows of deserted buildings, as Jenny Dugan’s,—the yellow-knotted . . . An arrowhead at the desert.

  Spergula arvensis—corn-spurry (some call it tares)—at the acorn tree. Filled my pockets with acorns. Found another gouge on Dennis’s Hill. To have found the Indian gouges and tasted sweet acorns,—is it not enough for one afternoon? The sun set red in haze, visible fifteen minutes before setting, and the moon rose in like manner at the same time. This evening, I am obliged to sit with my door and window open, in a thin coat, which I have not done for three weeks at least. A warm night like this at this season produces its effect on the village. The boys are heard at play in the street now, at 9 o’clock, in greater force and with more noise than usual. My neighbor has got out his flute. There is more fog than usual. The moon is full. The tops of the woods in the horizon seen above the fog look exactly like long, low black clouds, the fog being the color of the sky.

  On Lee’s hillside by the pond, the old leaves of some pitch pines are almost of golden-yellow hue, seen in the sunlight,—a rich autumnal look . . . A large sassafras tree behind Lee’s, two feet diameter at ground. As I return over the bridge, I hear a song sparrow singing on the willows exactly as in spring. I see a large sucker rise to the surface of the river. I hear the crickets singing loudly in the walls as they have not done (so loudly) for some weeks, while the sun is going down shorn of his rays by the haze. There is a thick bed of leaves in the road under Hubbard’s elms… Cut a stout purple can of pokeweed.

  2 P. M.—To Flint’s Pond. It was the seed-vessel of the Canada snapdragon in the Marlborough road that I mistook for a new flower. This is still in bloom in the Deep Cut . . .

  Going through Britton’s clearing, I find a black snake out enjoying the sun . . . Our Irish washwoman, seeing me playing with the milkweed seeds, said they filled beds with that down in her country . . . Saw a smooth sumach beyond Cyrus Smith’s, very large. The elms in the village have lost many of their leaves, and their shadows by moonlight are not so heavy as last month. Another warm night.

  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.

  (But first a neighbor sent in a girl to inquire if I knew where worm-seed grew, otherwise called “Jerusalem-oak” (so said the recipe which she brought cut out of a newspaper), for her mistress’s hen had the “gapes.” But I answered that this was a Southern plant and [I] knew not where it was to be had. Referred her to the poultry book. Also the next proprietor commenced stoning and settling down the stone for a new well, an operation which I wished to witness, purely beautiful, simple, and necessary. The stones laid on a wheel, and continually added to above as it is settled down by digging under the wheel. Also Goodwin, with a partridge and a stout mess of large pickerel, applied to me to dispose of a mud turtle which he had found moving the mud in a ditch. Some men will be in the way to see such movements.) . . .

  Cut three white pine boughs opposite Fair Haven, and set there up in the bow of our boat for a sail. It was pleasant [to] hear the water begin to ripple under the prow, telling of our easy progress. We thus without a tack made the south side of Fair Haven, then threw our sails overboard, and the moment after mistook them for green bushes or weeds which had sprung from the bottom unusually far from shore. Then to hear the wind sough in your sail,—that is to be a sailor and hear a land sound. The grayish-whitish mikania, all fuzzy, covers the endless button-bushes, which are now bare of leaves . . .

  In some places in the meadows opposite Bound Rock, the river seemed to have come to an end, it was so narrow suddenly. After getting in sight of Sherman’s Bridge, counted nineteen birches on the right-hand shore in one whirl.

  Now commenced the remarkable meandering of the river, so that we seemed for some [time] to be now running up, then running down parallel with a long, low hill, tacking over the meadow in spite of ourselves. Landed at Sherman’s Bridge. An apple tree, made scrubby by being browsed by cows . . .

  Rowed about twenty-four miles, going and coming. In a straight line it would be fifteen and one half.

  This on my way to Conantum, 2.30 P.M. It is a bright, clear, warm November day. I feel blessed. I love my life I ward toward all nature . . .

  Minott says that G. M. Barrett told him that Amos Baker told him that during Concord Fight he went over behind the hill to the old Whittaker place (Sam Buttrick’s) and stayed. Yet he was described as the only survivor of Concord Fight. Received a pension for running away? . . .

  The rain of night before last has raised the river at least two feet, and the meadows wear a late-fall look . . .

  Saw a canoe birch by road beyond the Abel Minott house; distinguished it thirty rods off by the chalky whiteness of its limbs . . .

  [Four fifths of a page missing]

  From there we looked over the lower land and westward to the Jenkins house and Wachusett; the latter to-day a very faint blue, almost lost in the atmosphere. Entering Wayland, the sluggish country town, C. remarked that we might take the town if we had a couple of oyster-knives. We marvelled as usual at the queer-looking building which C. thought must be an engine-house, but which a boy told us was occupied as a shoemaker’s shop but was built for a library. C. was much amused here by a bigger schoolboy whom we saw on the common, one of those who stretch themselves on the back seats and can chew up a whole newspaper into a spitball to plaster the wall with when the master’s back is turned; made considerable fun of him, and thought this the event of Wayland. Soon got to a country new to us, in Wayland, opposite to Pelham or Heard’s Pond . . .

  Close by we found Long Pond, in Wayland, Framingham, and Natick, a great body of water with singularly sandy, shelving, caving, undermined banks; and there we ate our luncheon. The mayflower leaves we saw there, and the Viola pedata in blossom. We went down it a mile or two on the east side through the woods on its high bank, and then dined, looking far down to what seemed the Boston outlet (opposite to its natural outlet), where a solitary building stood on the shore . . .

  Returned by the south side of Dudley Pond, which looked fairer than ever, though smaller,—now so still, the afternoon somewhat advanced, Nobscot in the west in a purplish light, and the scalloped peninsula before us . . .

  At Nonesuch Pond, in Natick, we saw a boulder some thirty-two feet square by sixteen high, with a large rock leaning against it,—under which we walked,—forming a triangular frame, through which we beheld the picture of the pond. How many white men and Indians have passed under it! Boulder Pond! Thence across lots by the Weston elm, to the bounds of Lincoln at the railroad. Saw a delicate fringed purple flower, Gentiana crinita, between those Weston hills, in a meadow, and after on higher land.

  C kept up an incessant strain of wit, banter, about my legs, which were so springy and unweariable, declared I had got my double legs on, that they were not cork but steel, that I should let myself to Van Amburgh, should have them sent to the World’s Fair, etc., etc.; wanted to know if I could not carry my father Anchises.

  The sun sets while we are perched on a high rock in the north of Weston. It soon grows finger cold. At Walden are three reflections of the bright full (or nearly) moon, one moon and two sheens further off.

  Ah, those sun-sparkles on Dudley Pond in this November day! What a heaven to live in! . . .

  4 P. M.—I find ice under the north side of woods nearly an inch thick, where the acorns are frozen in, which have dropped from the overhanging oaks and been saved from the squirrels, perchance by the water. W. E. C. says he found a ripe strawberry last week in Berkshire. Saw a frog at the Swamp Bridge on back road.

  James P. Brown’s retired pond, now shallow and more than half dried up, seems far away and rarely visited, known to few, though not far off . . .

  White Pond is prepared for winter. Now that most other trees have lost their leaves, the evergreens are more conspicuous about its shores and on its capes . . .

  7 P. M.—To Conantum.

  A still, cold night. The light of the rising moon in the east . . . To-day I heard for the first time this season the crackling, vibrating sound which resounds from thin ice when a stone is cast upon it . . .

  A cold and dark afternoon, the sun being behind clouds in the west . . .

  The mountains are of an uncommonly dark blue . . .

  I see snow on the Peterboro hills, reflecting the sun . . .

  Just spent a couple of hours (eight to ten) with Miss Mary Emerson at Holbrook’s . . .

  In the evening went to a party. It is a bad place to go to,—thirty or forty people, mostly young women, in a small room, warm and noisy. Was introduced to two young women. The first one was as lively and loquacious as a chickadee; had been accustomed to the society of watering-places, and therefore could get no refreshment out of such a dry fellow as I. The other was said to be pretty-looking, but I rarely look people in their faces, and moreover, I could not hear what she said, there was such a clacking,—could only see the motion of her lips when I looked that way. I could imagine better places for conversation, where there should be a certain degree of silence surrounding you, and less than forty talking at once. Why, this afternoon, even, I did better. There was old Mr. Joseph Hosmer and I ate our luncheon of cracker and cheese together in the woods. I heard all he said, though it was not much, to be sure, and he could hear me. And then he talked out of such a glorious repose, taking a leisurely bite at the cracker and cheese between his words; and so some of him was communicated to me, and some of me to him, I trust.

  These parties, I think, are part of the machinery of modern society, that young people may be brought together to form marriage connections . . .

  Asked Therien this afternoon if he had got a new idea this summer. “Good Lord!” says he, “a man that has to work as I do, if he does not forget the ideas he has had, he will do well. Maybe the man you work with is inclined to race; then, by gorry, your mind must be there; you think of weeds” . . .

  Now at sundown I hear the hooting of an owl,—hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo . . .

  Deacon Brown told me to-day of a tall, raw-boned fellow by the name of Hosmer who used to help draw the seine behind the Jones house, who once, when he had hauled it up without getting a single shad, held up a little perch in sport above his face, to show what he had got. At that moment the perch wiggled and dropped right down his throat head foremost, and nearly suffocated him; and it was only after considerable time, during which the man suffered much, that he was extracted or forced down. He was in a worse predicament than a fish hawk would have been.

  In the woods south of the swamp are many great holes made by digging for foxes.

  Standing by Harrington’s pond-hole in the swamp, which had skimmed over, we saw that there were many holes through the thin black ice, of various sizes, from a few inches to more than a foot in diameter, all of which were perfectly circular. Mr. H. asked me if I could account for it. As we stood considering, we jarred the boggy ground and made a dimple in the water, and this accident, we thought, betrayed the cause of it: i. e. the circular wavelets so wore off the edges of the ice when once a hole was made.

  As I was riding by the Ministerial Lot this morning about 8.30 A. M., I observed that the white clouds were disposed raywise in the west and also in the east,—as if the sun’s rays had split and so arranged them? . . . Mr. J. Hosmer tells me that one spring he saw a red squirrel gnaw the bark of a maple and then suck the juice, and this he repeated many times.

  What is the bush where we dined in Poplar Hollow? Hosmer tells of finding a kind of apple, with an apple seed (?) to it, on scabish which had been injured or cut off. Thinks plowed ground more moist than grass ground.

  Frank Brown showed me to-day the velvet duck (white winged coot) and the surf duck . . .

  Old Mr. Joseph Hosmer, who lives where Hadley did, remembers when there were two or three times as many inhabitants in that part of the town as there are now . . .

  As I returned through Hosmer’s field, the sun was setting just beneath a black cloud by which it had been obscured, and as it had been a cold and windy afternoon, its light, which fell suddenly on some white pines between me and it, lighting them up like a shimmering fire, and also on the oak leaves and chestnut stems, was quite a circumstance.

  Bass . . . . . . . . . . . 6

  Black ash . . . . . . . . . . 8

  Elm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 (See if all are really elms.)

  Red (?) oak . . . . . . . . 2

  White ash . . . . . . . . . . 2

  Walnut . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

  Apple . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

  Maple . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

  Hornbeam . . . . . . . . . . 2

  Swamp white (?) oak 1

  Dogwood also there is, and cone-bearing willow, and what kind of winterberry with a light-colored bark?

  Another such a sunset to-night as the last, while I was on Conantum.

  When I think of the Carlisle man whom I saw to-day and the filthiness of his house, I am reminded that there are all degrees of barbarism, even in this so-called civilized community. Carlisle, too, belongs to the Nineteenth Century.

  Saw Perez Blood in his frock,—a stuttering, sure, unpretending man, who does not speak without thinking, does not guess.

  Saw a large hawk circling over a pine wood below me, and screaming, apparently that he might discover his prey by their flight. Travelling ever by wider circles. What a symbol of the thoughts, now soaring, now descending, taking larger and larger circles, or smaller and smaller. It flies not directly whither it is bound, but advances by circles, like a courtier of the skies. No such noble progress! How it comes round, as with a wider sweep of thought! But the majesty is in the imagination of the beholder, for the bird is intent on its prey. Circling and ever circling, you cannot divine which way it will incline, till perchance it dives down straight as an arrow to its mark. It rises higher above where I stand, and I see with beautiful distinctness its wings against the sky,—primaries and secondaries, and the rich tracery of the outline of the latter (?), its inner wings, or wing-linings, within the outer,—like a great moth seen against the sky. A will-o’-the-wind. Following its path, as it were through the vortices of the air. The poetry of motion . . .

  Sunlight on pine-needles winter day. Who ever saw a partridge soar over the fields? To every creature its own nature. They are very wild; but are they scarce? or can you exterminate them for that?

  As I stand by the edge of the swamp (Ministerial), a heavy-winged hawk flies home to it at sundown, just over my head, in silence. I cross some mink or muskrat’s devious path in the snow, with mincing feet and trailing body.

  To-night, as so many nights within the year, the clouds arrange themselves in the east at sunset in long converging bars, according to the simple tactics of the sky.

  I was struck by the amount of small interlaced roots—making almost a solid mass—of some red (?) oaks on the bank which the water had undermined, opposite Sam Barrett’s. Observed by a wall beneath Nawshawtuct where many rabbits appeared to have played and nearly half a pint of dung was dropped in one pile on the snow.

  By half past three the sun is fairly out. I go to the Cliffs . . .

  Now all the clouds grow black, and I give up to-night; but unexpectedly, half an hour later when I look out, having got home, I find that the evening star is shining brightly, and, beneath all, the west horizon is glowing red,—that dun atmosphere instead of clouds reflecting the sun,—and I detect, just above the horizon, the narrowest imaginable white sickle of the new moon.

  I had looked in vain into the west for nearly half an hour to see a red cloud blushing in the sky. The few clouds were dark, and I had given up all to night, but when I had got home and chanced to look out the window from the supper [table], I perceived that all the west horizon was glowing with a rosy border, and that dun atmosphere had been the cloud this time which made the day’s adieus.

  In the afternoon to Saw Mill Brook with W. E. C. Snow all gone from Minott’s hillside. The willow at the red house shines in the sun. The boys have come out under the hill to pitch coppers. Watts sits on his door-step. It is like the first of April. The wind is west. At the turnpike bridge, water stands a foot or two deep over the ice . . .

  The artist is at work in the Deep Cut. The telegraph harp sounds.

  I went down and measured it. It was about four feet in diameter where it was sawed, about one hundred feet long. Before I had reached it the axemen had already half divested it of its branches.

  This night I heard Mrs. S— [Elizabeth Oakes Smith] lecture on womanhood. The most important fact about the lecture was that a woman said it, and in that respect it was suggestive. Went to see her afterward, but the interview added nothing to the previous impression, rather subtracted . . . I carried her lecture for her in my pocket wrapped in her handkerchief; my pocket exhales cologne to this moment . . .

  Through the drizzling fog, now just before nightfall, I see from the Cliffs the dark cones of pine trees that rise above the level of the tree-tops, and can trace a few elm tree tops where a farmhouse hides beneath.