November. Saw Mill Brook..

November 4.

It is truly a raw and gusty day, and I hear a tree creak sharply like a bird, a phoebe. The jays with their scream are at home in the scenery.

The slender chestnuts, maples, elms, and white ash trees, which last are uncommonly numerous here, are now all bare of leaves, and a few small hemlocks, with their now thin but unmixed and fresh green foliage, stand over and cheer the stream and remind me of winter, the snows which are to come and drape them and contrast with their green, and the chickadees that are to flit and lisp amid them.

These little cheerful hemlocks, - the lisp of chickadees seems to come from them now, - each standing with its foot on the very edge of the stream, reaching sometimes part way over its channel, and here and there one has lightly stepped across. These evergreens are plainly as much for shelter for the birds as for anything else.

The fallen leaves are so thick they almost fill the bed of the stream and choke it. I hear the runnel gurgling underground. 

There are a few bright-green ferns lying flat by the sides of the brook, but it is cold, cold, withering to all else. It was quite a discovery when I first came upon this brawling mountain stream in Concord woods.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal , November 4, 1851