THIS DATE, FROM HENRY DAVID THOREAU'S JOURNAL

September 13, 1860

I go early to pick up my windfalls. Some of them are half buried in the soil, the rain having spattered the dirt over them.

The river this morning, about 7 A. M., is already twenty-eight and a half inches above summer level, and more than twenty inches of this is owing to the rain of yesterday and last night!! By 1:30 P. M., when it has risen two or three inches more, I can just cross the meadow in a straight line to the Rock. I see a snake swimming on the middle of the tide, far from shore, washed out of the meadow, and myriads of grasshoppers and beetles, etc., are wrecked or clinging to the weeds and stubble that rises above the flood. At evening the river is five inches higher than in the morning.

There is very little current at my boat’s place this evening, yet a chip floats down (and next morning, the 14th, I see that a large limb has been carried up-stream during the night, from where it lay at evening, some twenty rods above the junction, to a place thirty rods above the junction). Yet, when I try the current (in the evening of the 13th) with a chip, it does down at Heron Rock, but the limb was large and irregular, and sank very deep in the water; so I think that the Assabet water was running up beneath while the Musketaquid flowed down over it slowly.

A Carlisle man tells me of a coon he killed in Carlisle which weighed twenty-three and a half pounds and dressed fourteen pounds. He frequently sees and hears them at present.

September 12, 1860

Very heavy rain to-day (equinoctial), raising the river suddenly. I have said, within a week, that the river would rise this fall because it did not at all in the spring, and now it rises. A very dark and stormy night (after it); shops but half open. Where the fence is not painted white I can see nothing, and go whistling for fear I run against some one, though there is little danger that any one will be out. I come against a stone post and bruise my knees; then stumble over a bridge, - being in the gutter. You walk with your hands out to feel the fences and trees. There is no vehicle in the street to-night.

The thermometer at 4 P. M. was 54°.

There was pretty high wind in the night.

September 11, 1860

The turtles, painted and sternothærus, are certainly less timid than in the spring. I see a row of half a dozen or more painted turtles on a slanting black willow, so close together that two or three of them actually have their fore feet on the shells of their predecessors, somewhat like a row of bricks that is falling. The scales of some are culed up and just falling.

September 10, 1860

If you sit at an open attic window almost anywhere, about the 20th of September, you will see many a milkweed down go sailing by on a level with you, - though commonly it has lost its freight, - notwithstanding that you may not know of any of these plants growing in your neighborhood.

September 9, 1860

In Lowell. - My host says that the thermometer was at 80° yesterday morning, and this morning is at 52°. Sudden coolness.

Clears up in afternoon, and I walk down the Merrimack on the north bank. I see very large plants of the lanceolate thistle, four feet high and very branching. Also Aster cordata with the corymbosus.

Concord River has a high and hard bank at its mouth, maybe thirty feet high on the east side; and my host thinks it was originally about as high on the west side, where now it is much lower and flat, having been dug down. There is a small isle in the middle of the mouth. There are rips in the Merrimack just below the mouth of the Concord. There is a fall and dam in the Concord at what was Hurd’s factory, - the principal fall on the Concord, in Lowell, - one at a bleachery above, and at Whipple’s, - three in all below Billerica dam.

September 8, 1859

The 7th, 8th, and 9th, the State muster is held here. The only observation I have to make is that [Concord] is fuller of dust and more uninhabitable than I ever knew it to be before. Not only the walls, fences, and houses are thickly covered with dust, but the fields and meadows and bushes; and the pads in the river for half a mile from the village are white with it. From a mile or two distant you see a cloud of dust over the town and extending thence to the muster-field. I went to the store the other day to buy a bolt for our front door, for, as I told the storekeeper, the Governor was coming here. “Aye,” said he, “and the Legislature too.” “Then I will take two bolts,” said I. He said that there had been a steady demand for bolts and locks of late, for our protectors are coming. The surface of the roads for three to six inches in depth is a light and dry powder like ashes.

September 7, 1860

P. M. - To Cardinal Shore.

I see many seedling shrub oaks springing up in Potter’s field by the swamp-side, some (of last year) in the open pasture, but many more in the birch wood half a dozen rods west from the shrub oaks by the path. The former were dropped by the way. They plant in birch woods as in pines. This small birch wood has been a retreat for squirrels and birds. When I examine the little oaks in the open land there is always an effete acorn with them.

Common rose hips as handsome as ever.

September 6, 1859

The liatris is, perhaps, a little past prime. It is a very rich purple in favorable lights and makes a great show where it grows. Any one to whom it is new will be surprised to learn that it is a wild plant. For prevalence and effect it may be put with the vernonia, and it has a general resemblance to thistles and knapweed, but is a handsomer plant than any of them.

September 5, 1859

Spent a part of the forenoon in the woods in the northwest part of Acton, searching for a stone suitable for a millstone for my lead-mill.

September 4, 1853

In Potter’s dry pasture I saw the ground black with blackbirds (troopials?). As I approach, the front rank rises and flits a little further back into the midst of the flock, - it rolls up on the edges, - and, being thus alarmed, they soon take to flight, with a loud rippling rustle, but soon alight again, the rear wheeling swiftly into place like well-drilled soldiers. Instead of being an irregular and disorderly crowd, they appear to know and keep their places and wheel with the precision of drilled troops.