Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/349

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SUMMER.
339

and what they put into them in the course of a day. Consider how well fitted to endure the fatigue of a day s excursion. A young chick will run all day in pursuit of grasshoppers, and occasionally vary its exercise by scratching, go to bed at night with protuberant crop, and get up early in the morning ready for a new start.

July 6, 1856. p. m. To Assabet bath. . . . I hear the distressed or anxious peet of a peetweet, and see it hovering over its young, half-grown, which runs beneath, and suddenly hides securely in the grass when but a few feet from me.

G. Emerson says the sweetbrier was doubt less introduced, yet according to Bancroft, Gosnold found it on the Elizabeth Isles.

July 6, 1859. . . . p. m. To Lee's Cliff. . . . The heart-leaf flower is now very conspicuous and pretty in that pool westerly of the old Conantum house. Its little, white, five-petalled flower, about the size of a five-cent piece, looks like a little white lily. Its perfectly heart-shaped floating leaf, an inch or more long, is the smallest kind of pad. There is a single pad to each slender stem which is from one to several feet long in proportion to the depth of the water, and these padlets cover sometimes, like an imbrication, the whole surface of a pool. Close underneath each leaf or pad is concealed an umbel of