To Tommy Wheeler wood-lot.

November 1. 

A perfect Indian-summer day, and wonderfully warm. 72+ at 1 P. M. and probably warmer at two.

The butterflies are out again, - probably some new broods. I see the common yellow and two Vanessa Antiopa, and yellow-winged grasshoppers with blackish edges.

A striped snake basks in the sun amid dry leaves.

Gossamer on the withered grass is shimmering in the fields, and flocks of it are sailing in the air.

Measure some pine stumps on Tommy Wheeler's land, about that now frosty hollow, cut as I judge from sprouts four years ago.  No. 6, having 164 rings and having been cut four years, sprang up at least one hundred and sixty-eight years ago, or about the year 1692, or fifty-seven years after the settlement, 1635. 


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 1, 1860 

A perfect Indian-summer day, and wonderfully warm. 72+ at 1 P. M. See November 1, 2015 ("A beautiful Indian-summer day, the most remarkable hitherto and equal to any of the kind. ")

Gossamer on the withered grass is shimmering in the fields, and flocks of it are sailing in the air. See November 1, 1851 ("It is a remarkable day for fine gossamer cobwebs. Here in the causeway, as I walk toward the sun, I perceive that the air is full of them streaming from off the willows and spanning the road, all stretching across the road, and yet I cannot see them in any other direction, and feel not one. . . .Why should this day be so distinguished?"); See also November 7, 1855 ("Looking west over Wheeler’s meadow, I see that there has been much gossamer on the grass, and it is now revealed by the dewy mist which has collected on it.”) and note to November 3, 1857 ("Looking westward now, at 4 P.M., I see against the sunlight, where the twigs of a maple and black birch intermingle, a little gossamer or fine cobwebs, but much more the twigs, especially of the birch, waving slightly, reflect the light like cobwebs. It is a phenomenon peculiar to this season, when the twigs are bare and the air is clear. I cannot easily tell what is cobweb and what twig,")  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Gossamer Days

Measure some pine stumps on Tommy Wheeler's land cut four years ago. SeeJuly 8, 1857 (“Counted the rings of a white pine stump, sawed off last winter at Laurel Glen. It was three and a half feet diameter and has one hundred and twenty-six rings.”); See also October 20, 1860 ("I examine Ebby Hubbard's old oak and pine wood. The trees may be a hundred years old.”)