We are baptized into nature.

May 25.

P. M. — With Ricketson to my boat under Fair Haven Hill. 

In Hubbard's Grove, hear the shrill chattering of downy woodpeckers, very like the red squirrel's tche tche. 

Thermometer at 87° at 2.30 p. m. 

It is interesting to hear the bobolinks from the meadow sprinkle their lively strain along amid the tree-tops as they fly over the wood above our heads. It resounds in a novel manner through the aisles of the wood, and at the end that fine buzzing, wiry note. 

The black spruce of Holden's, apparently yesterday, but not the 23d. 

What a glorious crimson fire as you look up to the sunlight through the thin edges of the scales of its cones! So intensely glowing in their cool green beds! while their purplish sterile blossoms shed pollen on you. 

Took up four young spruce and brought them home in the boat. 

After all, I seem to have distinguished only one spruce, and that the black, judging by the cones, — perhaps the dark and light varieties of it, for the last is said to be very like the white spruce. The white spruce cones are cylindrical and have an entire firm edge to the scales, and the needles are longer. 

Though the river is thus high, we bathe at Cardinal Shore and find the water unexpectedly warm and the air also delicious. Thus we are baptized into nature.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 25, 1857

What a glorious crimson fire as you look up to the sunlight through the thin edges of the scales of its cones! . . . while their purplish sterile blossoms shed pollen on you. See May 21, 1857 ("The staminate buds of the black spruce are quite a bright red."); May 22, 1856 ("The red and cream-colored cone-shaped staminate buds of the black spruce will apparently shed pollen in one to three days?"); June 10, 1855 (" The white spruce cones are now a rich dark purple, more than a half inch long.")

Thus we are baptized into nature. See May 23, 1857 ("I wade in the swamp for the kalmia, amid the water andromeda and the sphagnum, scratching my legs with the first and sinking deep in the last. The water is now gratefully cool to my legs, so far from being poisoned in the strong water of the swamp. It is a sort of baptism for which I had waited. ")