Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/326

advantage from it by a crop of wood, all the villagers and the inhabitants of distant cities obtain some compensation in the crop of berries that it yields. They glean after the woodchopper, not faggots, but full baskets of blueberries. . . . Bathed beneath Fair Haven. How much food the muskrats have at hand! They may well be numerous. At this place the bottom in shallow water at a little distance from the shore is thickly covered with clams, half buried and on their ends, generally a little aslant. Sometimes there are a dozen or more side by side within a square foot, and I think that over a space twenty rods long and one wide (I know not how much farther they reach into the river), they would average three to a square foot. This would give 16,335 clams to twenty rods of shore, on one side of the river, and I suspect there are many more. No wonder that muskrats multiply, and that the shores are covered with the shells left by them. In bathing here I can hardly step without treading on them, sometimes half a dozen at once, and often I cut my feet pretty severely on their shells. They are partly covered with mud and the short weeds at the bottom, and they are of the same color themselves, but stooping down over them where the soil has subsided, I can see them now at 5.30 p. m. with their mouths (?) open, an inch long