Log Search Results

  A mizzling and rainy day with thick driving fog; a drizzling rain, or “drisk,” as one called it. I struck across into the stage-road, a quarter of a mile east, and followed that a mile or more into an extensive bare plain tract called Silver Springs, in the southwest part of Wellfleet . . .

  Stopped to drv me about ll A.M. at a house near John Newcomb’s, who they told me died last winter, ninety-five years old (or would have been now had he lived?). I had shortly before picked up a Mother-Carey’s-chicken, which was just washed up dead on the beach. This I carried tied to the tip of my umbrella, dangling outside. When the inhabitants saw me come up from the beach this stormy day, with this emblem dangling from my umbrella, and saw me set it up in a corner carefully to be out of the way of cats, they may have taken me for a crazy man . . .

  E. Bartlett [Edward Bartlett] has found three bobolinks’ nests . . .

  2 P.M.—To Walden and Cliffs . . .

  Standing on Emerson’s Cliff, I see very distinctly the redness of a luxuriant field of clover on the top of Fair Haven Hill, some two thirds of a mile off, the day being cloudy and misty, the sun just ready to break out. You might have mistaken the redness for that of withered pine boughs where wood was cut last winter . . .

  We left St. Paul last night about 5 o’clock with Governor Ramsey, the Governor of Minnesota, on board and about 25 volunteers on board going up to Fort Ridgely.

  Coming up this morning we [saw] a field, or rather a meadow on the banks of the river, which was pink with wild roses . . .

  They have a band on board which is now playing a tune I do not know what one. There are I should think over a hundred passengers on board, and it is a small boat, so that a great many of them have to sleep wherever they can around on chairs, or on the floor, or on trunks, etc.

  It is a beautiful day, rather hot in the sun and as the river is so narrow we can see everything on the banks very easily.

9:45 P.M.

  Since I wrote the above we have passed Le Sueur, Traverse des Sioux, St. Peter’s and Mankato, & we are now stopping at South Bend and I do not know but what we may stay here all night as the water is pretty low and the river is full of sand bars and snags . . .

  I am writing in my bed in my stateroom.

  I ought to have responded before this to yours of the 5th inst. but have been absent—hurried, &c &c. I have had no time to bestow upon it till to-day.

  I shall get you some money for the articles you send me, though not immediately.

  As to your longer account of a canadian tour, I don’t know. It looks unmanageable. Can’t you cut it into three or four, and omit all that relates to time? The cities are described to death; but I know you are at home with Nature, and that she rarely and slowly changes. Break this up if you can, and I will try to have it swallowed and digested.

  I enclose herewith two articles from my friend Henry D. Thoreau, of Concord, Mass. the pupil of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose name must be familiar to you. You may never have see his book—“A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers”—but his articles in Graham’s Magazine—“Thomas Carlyle and his Writings,” Mount Katahdin and the Pine Woods of Maine”—though several years back, I think cannot have escaped you. I consider him one of the best of your young writers, and have solicited these pieces from him because I want to make him better known than he is. He has more Ms. on hand, but I shall not send you more unless you ask them. If you use these, I shall expect you to pay him. If you don’t want them, please preserve them and notify me, so that I can make another disposition of them. Yours

  Horace Greeley.

  P.S. If you happen to know where a copy of “The Dial” may be consulted, just look into it at one of Thoreau’ s articles—“A Winter Walk”—I don’t know who could write a better one. Yrs. H. G.

  Now, then, spring is beginning again in earnest after this short check . . . I no sooner step out of the house than I hear the bluebirds in the air, and far and near, everywhere except in the woods, throughout the town you may hear them . . . Everywhere also, all over the town, within an hour or two have come out little black two-winged gnats with plumed or fuzzy shoulders. When I catch one in my hands, it looks like [a] bit of black silk ravelling. I hear the chuck, chuck of a blackbird in the sky, whom I cannot detect . . . And there’s the great gull I came to see, already fishing in front of Bittern Cliff . . . The ice in Fair Haven is more than half melted . . .

  Hearing a faint quack, I looked up and saw two apparently dusky ducks winging their swift way northward over the course of the river. [William Ellery] Channing says he saw some large white-breasted ducks to-day, and also a frog. I have seen dead frogs, as if killed while dormant.

  P.M.—Walked round by the west side of the river to Conantum.

  Wind less violent. C. [William Ellery Channing] has already seen a yellow-spotted tortoise in a ditch. (Two sizable elms by river in Merrick’s pasture blown down, roots being rotted off on water side.) . . .