Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/25

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SUMMER.
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nests near my old bathing place above the stone heaps, with sharp, yellow, sandy edges, like a milk pan from within. . . . Also there are three or four small stone heaps formed. . . .

The painted-cup meadow is all lit up with ferns on its springy slopes. The handsome flowering fern, now rapidly expanding and fruiting at the same time, colors these moist slopes afar with its now commonly reddish fronds; and then there are the interrupted and the cinnamon ferns in very handsome and regular tufts, and the brakes standing singly, and more backward. . . .

June 2, 1855. From that cocoon of the Attacus cecropia which I found—I think it was on the 24th of May—came out this forenoon a splendid moth. I had pinned the cocoon to the sash at the upper part of my window, and quite forgotten it. About the middle of the forenoon S—— came in, and exclaimed that there was a moth on my window. My Attacus cecropia had come out and dropped down to the window-sill, where it hung on the side of a slipper, to let its wings hang down and develop themselves. At first the wings were not only not unfolded later ally, but not longitudinally, the thinner ends of the foremost ones for perhaps three fourths of an inch being very feeble, and occupying very little space. It was surprising to see the creature unfold and expand before our eyes, the