Log Search Results

  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.

  IIow, rapidly new flowers unfold! as if Nature would get through her work too soon. One has as much as he can do to observe how flowers successively unfold. It is a flowery revolution, to which but few attend. Hardly too much attention can be bestowed on flowers. We follow, we march after, the highest color; that is our flag, our standard, our “color.” Flowers were made to be seen, not overlooked . . .

  On Mt. Misery, panting with heat, looking down the river. The haze an hour ago reached to Wachusett; now it obscures it. Methinks there is a male and female shore to the river, one abrupt, the other flat and meadowy. Have not all streams this contrast more or less, on the one hand eating into the bank, on the other depositing their sediment? . . .

  P.M.—To Trillium Woods.

  Clover now in its prime. What more luxuriant than a clover-field? The poorest soil that is covered with it looks incomparably fertile. This is perhaps the most characteristic feature of June, resounding with the hum of insects . . .

  5 P.M., I hear distinctly the sound of thunder in the northwest, but not a cloud is in sight, only a little thickness or mistiness in that horizon, and we get no shower . . .

  Found a nest of tortoise eggs, apparently buried last night, which I brought home, ten in all,—one lying wholly on the surface,—and buried in the garden . . .

  P.M.—Up Assabet to Garlic Wall . . .

  7 P.M.—To Cliff by railroad . . .

  I see a strange warbler still in this swamp. A chestnut and gray backed bird, five or six inches long, with a black throat and yellow crown; note, chit chit chill le le, or chut chut a -wetter chut a wut, che che . . .

  P.M.—To some woods southwest of Worcester . . .

  A night-flowering cereus opens three or four times at a Mrs. Newton’s while I am there . . .

  2 P.M.—Ride to Manomet with [Benjamin Marston] Watson and wife, through Manomet Ponds village, about eight miles. At the mouth of Eel River, the marsh vetchling (Lathyrus palustris), apparently in prime, some done. The curve of the shore on the cast of Plymouth Beach is said to resemble the Bay of Naples. Manomet was quite a hill, over which the road ran in the woods. We struck the shore near Holmes’s Hotel about half a mile north of Manomet Point.

  There I shouldered my pack and took leave of my friends,—who thought it a dreary place to leave me,—and my journey along the shore was begun . . .

  Sitting by Hubbard Bath [?] swamp wood and looking north, at 3 P.M., I notice the now peculiar glaucous color of the very water, as well as the meadow-grass (i.e. sedge), at a dozen or twenty rods’ distance, seen through the slight haze which accompanies this first June heat . . .