The crows are very conspicuous, black against the green.

October 18.

October 18, 2015 

There are a great many crows scattered about on the meadow. What do they get to eat there? The crows are very conspicuous, black against the green.

Also I scare up a dozen larks at once. 

A large brown marsh hawk comes beating the bush along the river, and ere long a slate-colored one (male), with black tips, is seen circling against a distant wood-side. 

I scare up in midst of the meadows a great many dark colored sparrows, one or two at a time, which go off with a note somewhat like the lesser redpoll’s,—some migrating kind, I think.

There is no life perceptible on this broad meadow except what I have named.  

The maple swamps, bare of leaves, here and there about the meadow, look like smoke blown along the edge of the woods. Some distinct maples, wholly stripped, look very wholesome and neat.

Thinking of my own unsatisfactory life, doing as others do without any fixed star habitually in my eye, my foot not planted on any blessed isle, I ask myself why I might not be washing some gold daily, though it were only the finest particles, or might not sink a shaft down to the gold within me and work that mine. Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.

To-day my shoes are whitened with the gossamer which I noticed yesterday on the meadow-grass.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 18, 1855

The maple swamps, bare of leaves, here and there about the meadow, look like smoke blown along the edge of the woods.. See October 10, 1851 ("Some maples which a week ago were a mass of yellow foliage are now a fine gray smoke, as it were, and their leaves cover the ground."); October 12, 1851 ("Many maples around the edges of the meadows are now quite bare, like smoke."); October 13, 1852 ("Many maples have lost all their leaves and are shrunk all at once to handsome clean gray wisps on the edge of the meadows. Crowded together at a distance they look like smoke.”); October 18, 1853 ("The red maples have been bare a good while. In the sun and this clear air, their bare ashy branches even sparkle like silver."): October 13, 1855 ("The maples now stand like smoke along the meadows"); October 13, 1857 (“Maple fires are burnt out generally, and they have fairly begun to fall and look smoky in the swamps. ”); October 18, 1858 ("I am struck by the magical change which has taken place in the red maple swamps . . . like the smoke that is seen where a blaze is extinguished")

Gossamer which I noticed yesterday on the meadow-grass. See October 17, 1855 ("A fine Indian-summer afternoon. There is much gossamer on the button-bushes, now bare of leaves, and on the sere meadow-grass, looking toward the sun, in countless parallel lines, like the ropes which connect the masts of a vessel."); See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Gossamer Days

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