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  I look at a grass-bird on a wall in the dry Great Fields . . . (Journal, 7:489-490).

  I have got both of your letters at once. You must not think Concord so barren a place when Channing is away. There are the river & fields left yet, and I, though ordinarily a man of business, should have some afternoons and evenings to spend with you, I trust; that is: if you could stand so much of me. If you can spend your time profitably here, or without ennui, having an occasional ramble or tete-atete with one of the natives, it will give me pleasure to have you in the neighborhood. You see I am preparing you for our awful unsocial ways,—keeping in our dense a good part of the day, sucking or claws perhaps.—But then we make a religion of it, and that you cannot but respect.

  If you know the taste of your own heart and like it—come to Concord, and I’ll warrant you enough here to season the dish with,—aye, when though C and E[merson] and I were all away. We might paddle quietly up the river—then there are one or two more ponds to be seen, &c.

  I should very much enjoy further rambling with you in your vicinity, but I must postpone for the present. To tell the truth, I am planning to get seriously to work after these long months of inefficiency and idleness. I do not know whether you are haunted by any such demon which puts you on the alert to pluck the fruit of each day as it passes, and store it safely in your bin. True, it is will to live abandonedly from time to time, but to our working hours that must be as the spile to the bung. So for a long season I must enjoy only a low slanting glean in my mind’s eye from the Middleborough Pond far away.

  Methinks I am getting a little more strength into those knees of mine; and, for my part, I believe that God does delight into the strength of a man’s legs.

  Yours
  Henry D. Thoreau

  P.M.—To chestnuts, down Turnpike.

  I notice these flowers on the way by the roadside, which survive the frost . . .

  Found amid the sphagnum on the dry bank on the south side of the Turnpike, just below Everett’s meadow, a rare and remarkable fungus, such as I have heard of but never seen before. The whole height six and three quarters inches, two thirds of it being buried in the sphagnum . . .

  It clears up entirely by noon, having been cloudy in the forenoon, and is as warm as before now . . .

  I think that the principal stages in the autumnal changes of trees are these, thus far, as I remember, this year:—

  First, there were in September the few prematurely blushing white maples, or blazing red ones in water, that reminded us of October. Next, the red maple swamps blazed out in all their glory, attracting the eyes of all travellers and contrasting with other trees. And hard upon these came the ash trees and yellowing birches, and walnuts, and elms, and the sprout-land oaks, the last streaking the hillsides far off, often occupying more commanding positions than the maples. All these add their fires to those of the maples. But even yet the summer is unconquered . . .

  There is less wind these days than a week or fort night ago; calmer and more Indian-summer-like days . . .

  Willows generally turn yellow, even to the little sage willow, the smallest of all our species, but a foot or two high, though the Salixalba hardly attains to more than a sheen, polish . . .

  Horace Mann tells me that he found in the crop or inside of the stake-driver killed the other day one grass-hopper, several thousand-legs one to one and a half inches long, and not much else . . .