Thoreau writes in his journal:
Half a bushel of handsome pears on the ground under the wild pear tree on Pedrick’s land; some ripe, many more on tree. J. Wesson, who is helping me survey to-day, says that, when they dug the cellar of Stacy’s shop, he saw where they cut through (with a spade) birches six inches in diameter, on which the Mill-Dam had been built; also that Nathan Hosmer, Sr., since dead, told him that he had cut meadow-grass between the bakehouse and the Middlesex Hotel. I find myself covered with green and winged lice from the birches.
