Log Search Results

  P. M.—To Mason’s pasture in Carlisle.

  Cool but agreeable easterly wind. Streets now beautiful with verdure and shade of elms, under which you look, through an air clear for summer, to the woods in the horizon . . . But to return, as C. [William Ellery Channing] and I go through the town, we hear the cool peep of the robin calling its young, now learning to fly. The locust bloom is now perfect, filling the street with its sweetness, but it is more agreeable to my eye than my nose. The curled dock out. The fuzzy seeds or down of the black (? ) willows is filling the air over the river and, falling on the water, covers the surface. By the 30th of May, at least, white maple keys were falling. How early, then, they had matured their seed!

  The bay-wing sparrow apparently is not my seringo, after all . What is the seringo? I see some with clear, dirty-yellow breasts, but others, as to-day, with white breasts, dark-streaked. Both have the yellow over eye and the white line on crown . . .

  Our Mr. Fields who left by the steamer of the 7th for England took the proof sheets of Walden—In order to secure a copt in England the book must be published there as soon as here and at least 12 copies published and offered for sale. If Mr. F. succeeds in making a sale of the early sheets, it will doubtless be printed in London so as to cause very little delay here but if it be necessary to print and send out the copies it will delay us 3 or 4 weeks. Probably not more than three weeks. You will probably prefer to delay the publication that you may be sure of your cop’t in England.

  Truly yours

  W. D. Ticknor & Co.

  C. [William Ellery Channing] finds an egg to-day, somewhat like a song sparrow’s, but a little longer and slenderer, or with less difference between the ends in form, and more finely and regularly spotted all over with pale brown. It was in a pensile nest of grape-vine bark, on the low branch of a maple. Probably a cowbird’s; fresh-laid . . .

  Already the pads are much eaten before they are grown, and underneath, on the under side of almost every one, are the eggs of various species of insect, some so minute as to escape detection at first . . .

  P.M.—To Dugan Desert.

  Cornus alternifolia a day or two, up railroad; maybe longer elsewhere. Spergularta rubra by railroad, it having been dug up last year, and so delayed.

  The cuckoo of June 5th has deserted her nest, and I find the fragments of egg-shells in it; probably because I found it . . .

  P.M.—To White Cedar Swamp.

  A wood tortoise making a hole for her eggs just like a pieta’s hole. The Leucothoё racemosa, not yet generally out, but a little (it being mostly killed) a day or two.

  In Julius Smith’s yard, a striped snake (so called) was running about this forenoon, and in the afternoon it was found to have shed its slough . . .

  P.M.—To Assabet Bath and return by stone bridge . . .

  See a painted turtle digging her nest in the road at 5.45 P.M. . . .

  At the west bank, by the bathing-place, I see that several turtles’ holes have already been opened and the eggs destroyed by the skunk or other animal . . .

  At 6 P.M. it was 58º . . . (Journal, 13:341-343).

  I shall take this letter in to town this morning, nothing has happened that I can tell you of that I think of now but I will write again in a day or two. Goodbye

Your loving son

Horace Mann

It is such hard work to write that you must not expect every little particular, but I will tell you most of the things I do and how things look, and the rest when I get home. I am very well and have been ever since I left home and expect to be till I get back there again, and then I do not intend to be sick. Mr. Thoreau is getting well I think and I think will be entirely well before a great while, so do not fret about him.

  Dont you show this to any body now nor let either of the boys.

[Drawing]
  Representation of your loving son shooting a bird with that gun that kicks so.

Horace Mann