To some woods southwest of Worcester

June 15. 

Mrs. Brown reads a letter from John Downs in Philadelphia to Mr. Brown, in which he remembers his early youth in Shrewsbury and the pout accompanied by her young. 

A Miss Martha Le Barron describes to me a phosphorescence on the beach at night in Narragansett Bay. They wrote their names with some minute creatures on the sand. 

P. M. — To some woods southwest of Worcester. 

The moist bass bark just stripped from a sapling smells very like a cucumber. All three of us were struck by it. 

A night-flowering cereus opens three or four times at a Mrs. Newton’s while I am there. Once it opened at about 9 P. M., and closed and drooped and came to an end like a wet rag wrung out, at daylight. Transient as my mushroom. Was about a foot in diameter, but an ordinary stem, like the turkey’s feet. 

Diervilla well out.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 15, 1856