Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/137

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SUMMER.
127

The little globular, drooping, reddish buds of the Chimaphila umbellata (pipsissewa) are now very pretty.

How beautiful the solid cylinders of the lamb-kill now just before sunset, small ten-sided rosy-crimson basins, about two inches above the recurved, drooping, dry capsules of last year, and sometimes those of the year before, two inches lower.

When I have stayed out thus till late, many miles from home, and have heard a cricket beginning to chirp louder near me in the grass, I have felt that I was not far from home after all. Began to be weaned from my village home.

I see over the bream nests little schools of countless minute minnows (can they be young breams?), the breams being still in their nests.

It is surprising how thickly-strewn our soil is with arrow heads. I never see the surface broken in sandy places but I think of them. I find them on all sides, not only in corn, grain, potato, and bean fields, but in pastures and woods, by woodchucks holes and pigeon beds, and, as to-night, in a pasture where a restless cow had pawed the ground.

Is not the rosa lucida paler than the nitida?

June 13, 1860. 2 p. m. To Martial Miles's via Clamshell. I see at Martial Miles's two young woodchucks taken sixteen days ago, when