P. M. - To Lee’s Cliff.
The black spheres (rather dark brown) in the Rana sylvatica spawn by Hubbard’s Grove have now opened and flatted out into a rude broad pollywog form. (This was an early specimen.)
Yesterday saw moles working in a meadow, throwing up heaps.
I notice at the Conantum house, of which only the chimney and frame now stand, a triangular mass of rubbish, more than half a bushel, resting on the great mantel-tree against an angle in the chimney. It being mixed with clay, I at first thought it a mass of clay and straw mortar, to fill up with, but, looking further, I found it composed of corn-cobs, etc., and the excrement probably of rats, of this form and size, and of pure clay, looking like the cells of an insect. Either the wharf rat or this country rat. They had anciently chosen this warm place for their nest and carried a great store of eatables thither, and the clay of the chimney, washing down, had incrusted the whole mass over. So this was an old rats’ nest as well as human nest, and so it is with every old house. The rats’ nest may have been a hundred and fifty years old. Wherever you see an old house, there look for an old rats’ nest. In hard times they had, apparently, been compelled to eat the clay, or it may be that they love it. It is a wonder they had not set the house on fire with their nest. Conant says this house was built by Rufus Hosmer’s great-grandfather.
Slippery elm. Crowfoot (Rananculus fascicularis) at Lee’s since the 6th, apparently a day or two before this. Mouse-ear, not yet. What that large frog, bullfrog-like but with brown spots on a dirty-white throat, in a pool on Conantum? See thimble-berry and rose bush leafing under the rocks.
