Log Search Results

  6 P.M. – To Hubbard Bath and Fair Haven Hill . . . (Journal, 6:437-440).

  The low wood-paths are strewn with toadstools now, and I begin to perceive their musty scent,—great tumbae, or, as R. W. E. says, tuguria,—crowding one another by the path-side when there was not a fellow in sight; great towers that have fallen and made the plain shake; ponderous wheels that have lost their fellows, broken their axles, abandoned by the toady or swampy teamsters. Some whose eaves have been nibbled apparently by turtles. Ricketson says he saw a turtle eating a toadstool once. Some great dull-yellow towers,—towers of strength, to judge from their mighty columns . . .

  Suggesting to C. [William Ellery Channing] an Indian name for one of our localities, he thought it had too many syllables for a place so near the middle of town,—as if the more distant and less frequented place might have a longer name, less understood and less alive in its syllables . . .

  There is brought me this afternoon Thalictrum Cornuti, of which the club-shaped filaments (and sepals?) and seed-vessels are a bright purple and quite showy . . .

  When I reached the upper end of this weedy bar, at about 3 P.M., this warm day, I noticed some light-colored object in mid-river, near the other end of the bar . . . I saw C., who had just bathed, making signals to me with his towel, for I referred the object to the shore twenty rods further . . . But about this time I discovered with my naked eye that it was a blue heron standing in very shallow water amid the weeds of the bar and pluming itself . . .

  Suddenly comes a second, flying low, and alights on the bar yet nearer to me, almost high and dry. Then I hear a note from them, perhaps of warning,—a short, coarse, frog-like purring or eructating sound. You might easily mistake it for a frog. I heard it half a dozen times. It was not very loud. Anything but musical. The last proceeds to plume himself, looking warily at me from time to time, while the other continues to edge off through the weeds . . .

  We have now the scenery of winter, though the snow is but an inch or two deep . . .

  Ah, who can tell the serenity and clarity of a New England winter sunset? This could not be till the cold and the snow came. . . .