Log Search Results

  C. [William Ellery Channing] sees bluets and some kind of thrush to-day, size of wood thrush,—he thought probably hermit thrush.

Dear Sir—

  Send us immediately by Express 10 lbs. Plumbago with bill to

Yours Respt

L. Johnson & Co.

  In the morning the crickets snore, in the afternoon they chirp, at midnight they dream.

  Bidens connata (?) by pond-hole beyond Agricultural Ground; no rays yet at least. No traces of fringed gentian can I find. The liatris now in prime,—purple with a bluish reflection . . .

  I am struck by the clearness and stillness of the air, the brightness of the landscape, or, as it were, the reflection of light from the washed earth, the darkness and heaviness of the shade, as I look now up the river at the white maples and bushes, and the smoothness of the stream. If they are between you and the sun, the trees are more black than green. It must be owing to the clearness of the air since the rains, together with the multiplication of the leaves, whose effect has not been perceived during the mists of the dog-days. But I cannot account for this peculiar smoothness of the dimpled stream unless the air is stiller than before—nor for the peculiar brightness of the sun’s reflection from its surface. I stand on the south bank, opposite the black willows, looking up the full stream, which with a smooth, almost oily and sheeny surface, comes welling and dimpling onward, peculiarly smooth and bright now at 4 P.M., while the numerous trees seen up the stream . . .

  P.M.—Up Assabet by boat to Bath . . . A man tells me to-day that he once saw some black snake’s eggs on the surface of a tussock in a meadow just hatching, some hatched . . .

  The hillside at Clintonia Swamp is in some parts quite shingled with the rattlesnake-plantain (Goodyera pubescens) leaves overlapping one another. The flower is now apparently in its prime. As I stand there, I hear a peculiar sound which I mistake for a woodpecker’s tapping, but I soon sec a cuckoo hopping near suspiciously or inquisitively, at length within twelve feet, from once to time uttering a, hard, dry note . . .

  Flannery tells me that at about four o’clock this morning he saw white frost on the grass in the low ground near Holbrook’s meadow . . .

  P.M.—To Poplar Hill and the Great Fields . . .