Log Search Results

  P.M.—To Lincoln . . .

  Cut a limb of a cedar (near the Irishman’s shanty site at Flint’s panel) some two inches thick and three and a half feet from the ground. It had about forty-one rings . Adding ten, you have say fifty, years for the age of the tree . . .

  2 P. M.—To Conantum.

  A warm, damp, mistling day, without much wind. The white pines in Hubbard’s Grove have now a pretty distinct parti-colored look,—green and yellow mottled,—reminding me of some plants like the milkweed, expanding with maturity and pushing off their downy seeds . . . Sitting by the spruce swamp in Conant’s Grove, I am reminded that this is a perfect day to visit the swamps, with its damp, mistling, mildewy air, so solemnly still . . .

  Here was a large hornets’ nest, which when I went to take and first knocked on it to see if anybody was at home, out came the whole swarm upon me lively enough. I do not know why they should linger longer than their fellows whom I saw the other day, unless because the swamp is warmer. They were all within and not working, however. I picked up two arrowheads in the field beyond . . . The mist has now thickened into a fine rian, and I retreat.

  I find the hood-leaved violet quite abundant in a meadow, and the pedata in the Boulder Field . . .

  Children are now gathering barberries,—just the right time. Speaking of the great fall flower which the valleys are at present, its brightest petal is still the scarlet one of dogwood, and in some places the redder red maple one is equally bright . . .

  Poke berries in the sprout-land cast of the red huckleberry still fresh and abundant, perhaps a little past prime. I never saw so many. The plants stand close together, and their drooping racemes three to five inches long, of black or purplish-black berries . . .