Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/72

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62
SUMMER.

enced within the period of distinct memory, only to be paralleled by experiences which are for gotten. Perchance there are revolutions which create an interval impossible to the memory.

One of those gentle, straight-down rainy days, when the rain begins by spotting the cultivated fields, as if shaken down from a pepper-box; a fishing day, when I see one neighbor after an other, having donned his oil-cloth suit, walking or riding past with a fish-pole, having struck work, a day and an employment to make philosophers of them all.

June 7, 1853. p. m. To Walden. Clover begins to redden the fields generally. The quail is heard at a distance. Buttercups of various kinds mingled, yellow the meadows, the tall, the bulbous, the repens. The cinquefoil, in its ascending state, keeping pace with the grass, is now abundant in the fields. Saw it one or two weeks ago. This is a feature of June. Still both high and low blueberry and huckleberry blossoms abound. The hemlock woods, their fan-like sprays edged or spotted with short, yellowish-green shoots, tier above tier, shelf above shelf, look like a cool bazaar of rich embroidered goods. How dense their shade, dark and cool beneath them, as in a cellar. No plants grow there, but the ground is covered with fine red leaves. It is oftenest on a side hill they grow.