A very dark cloud

July 19.

A very dark cloud came up from the west this forenoon, - a dark curtain rolled up, with a grayish light beneath it, - which so darkened the streets and houses that seamstresses complained that they could not see to thread a needle, and for a few minutes rain fell in a deluge, the gutters ran full, and there was a whirlpool at every grating.

This month has been remarkably wet, and the haymakers are having very catching weather.

2 P. M. — Up river in boat.

The pontederia is now generally conspicuous and handsome, – a very fresh blue, — with no stale flowers.

You now see great beds of polygonums above the surface getting ready to bloom, and the dulichium stands thick in shallow water, while in the cultivated ground the pigweed, butterweed, and Roman wormwood, and amaranth are now rank and conspicuous weeds.

One troublesome rank weed in the garden now is the Panicum Crus-galli, - its great rather flat spreading branches. I see one just out.

I hear now that very fine pittering sound of a locust or cricket in the grass.

The Juncus militaris is commonly, but freshly, out.

We come to a standstill and study the pads in the J. Hosmer bulrush bog.

There are on the pads, eating them, not only many black slugs or grubs, but a great many small dark - brown beetles, a quarter of an inch long, with a pale-brown edge, copulating; also other beetles, skaters, and flies ( small brownish, large-winged flies in numbers together ), and a variety of eggs are fastened to the pads, many in little round pinkish patches.

I see one purplish patch exactly in the form of the point of a leaf, with a midrib, veins, and a bristle like point, calculated to deceive; this lying on the pad.

Some small erect pontederia leaves are white with eggs on the under side as if painted.

There are small open spaces amid the pads, — little deeps bottomed and surrounded with brown and ruddy hornwort like coral, — whose every recess is revealed in the sunlight.

Here hundreds of minnows of various sizes and species are poised, comparatively safe from their foes, and commonly a red spider is seen making its way from side to side of the deep.

The rich crimson under sides (with their regularly branching veins) of some white lily pads surpasses the color of most flowers.

No wonder the spiders are red that swim beneath; and think of the fishes that swim beneath this crimson canopy, — beneath a crimson sky.

I can frequently trace the passage of a boat, a pickerel fisher, perhaps, by the crimson under sides of the pads upturned.

The pads crowd and overlap each other in most amicable fashion.

Sometimes one lobe of a yellow lily pad is above its neighbor, while the other is beneath, and frequently I see where a little heart - leaf ( now showing its green spidery rays ) has emerged by the stem, in the sinus of a great nuphar leaf, and is outspread in the very midst of it.

The pads are rapidly consumed, but fresh ones are all the while pushing up and unrolling. They push up and spread out in the least crevice that offers.

Upland haying is past prime, and they are working into the low ground. None mowing on the Great Meadows yet.

I noticed on the 16th that the darkness of the pipes was not obvious, the sedge is now comparatively so dark.

Minott, who sits alone confined to his room with dropsy, observed the other day that it was a cold summer. He knew it was cold; the whip-poor-will told him so. It sung once and then stopped.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 19, 1860

A very dark cloud came up from the west this forenoon. See July 19, 1851("The river and the pond are blacker than the threatening cloud in the south.")