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  It clears up. A very bright rainbow. Three reds and greens. I see its foot within half a mile in the southeast, heightening the green of the pines. From Fair Haven Hill, I see a very distant, long, low dark-blue cloud, still left, in the northwest horizon beyond the mountains . . .

  8 P.M.—Up river to Hubbard Bathing-Place.

  Moon nearly full. A mild, almost summer evening after a very warm day, alternately clear and overcast. The meadows, with perhaps a little mist on than, look as if covered with frost in the moonlight . . .

  Father has received your letter of Nov. 10, but is at present unable to reply. He is quite sick with the jaundice, having been under the doctor’s care for a week; this, added to his long standing cold, has reduced him very much. He has no appetite, but little strength and gets very little sleep. We have written to aunts Maria & Jane to come up & see him.

  I am glad if your western experience has made you the more a New Englander -though your part of N.E. is rather cold -Cold as it is, however, I should like to see those woods and lakes, and & rivers in mid-winter, sometime.

  I find that the most profitable way to travel is, to write down your questions before you start, & be sure that you get them all answered, for when the opportunity offers you cannot always tell what you want to know, or, if you can will often neglect to learn it

  Edward Hoar is in Concord still. I hear that the moose horns which you have him make the principal or best part of an elaborate hat-tree

  Sophia sends much love to Cousin Rebecca & expects an answer to her letter.

  Yrs
  Henry D. Thoreau

  Now for a brisk and energetic walk, with a will and a purpose. Have done with sauntering, in the idle sense. You must rush to the assault of winter. Make haste into the outskirts, climb the ramparts of the town, be on the alert and let nothing escape your observation . . .

  P. M.—To Cliffs. I hear Lincoln bell tolling for church . . . A cloudy, misty day with rain more or less steady. This gentle rain is fast loosening the leaves,—I see them filling the air at the least puff,—and it is also flattening down the layer which has already fallen. The pines on Fair Haven have shed nearly all their leaves. Butter-and-eggs still blooms. Barrels of apples lie under the trees. The Smiths have carried their last load of peaches to market. To-day no part of the heavens is so clear and bright as Fair Haven Pond and the river . . .

  Minott calls the stake-driver “belcher-squelcher.” Says he has seen them when making the noise. They go slug-toot, slug-toot, slug-toot. Told me of his hunting gray squirrels with old Colonel Brooks’s hound. How the latter came into the yard one day, and he spoke to him, patted him, went into the house, took down his gun marked London, thought he would go a-squirrel-hunting. Went over among the ledges, away from Brooks’s, for Tige had a dreadful strong voice and could be heard as far as a cannon, and he was plaguy [?] afraid Brooks would hear him. How Tige treed them on the oaks on the plain below the Cliffs. He could tell by his bark when he had treed one; he never told a lie. And so he got six or seven. How Tige told him from a distance that he had got one, but when he came up he could see nothing; but still he knew that Tige never told a lie, and at length he saw his head, in a crotch high up in the top of a very tall oak, and though he didn’t expect to get him, he knocked him over.