The great tupelo on the edge of Scituate.

July 5. 

In middle of the forenoon sailed in the Melrose. 

We hugged the Scituate shore as long as possible on account of wind. The great tupelo on the edge of Scituate is very conspicuous for many miles about Minot’s Rock. 

Scared up a flock of young ducks on the Bay, which have been bred hereabouts. Saw the petrel.

l Went to Gifford’s Union House (the old Tailor’s Inn) in Provincetown. They have built a town-house since I was here —the first object seen in making the port.

Talked with Nahum Haynes, who is making fisherman’s boots there. He came into the tavern in the evening. I did not know him —only that he was a Haynes. 

He remembered two mud turtles caught in a seine with shad on the Sudbury meadows forty years ago, which would weigh a hundred pounds each. Asked me, “Who was that man that used to live next to Bull’s, — acted as if he were crazy or out?” 

Talked with a man who has the largest patch of cranberries here, —ten acres, — and there are fifteen or twenty acres in all. 

The fishermen sell lobsters fresh for two cents apiece.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 5, 1855

The great tupelo on the edge of Scituate... See July 27, 1851 ("Visit the large tupelo tree (Nyssa multiflora) in Scituate, whose rounded and open top I can see from Mr. Sewal's, the tree which George Emerson went twenty-five miles to see, called sometimes snag-tree and swamp hornbeam, also pepperidge and gum-tree.”)