I can find no bright leaves now in the woods.

October 23. 

P. M. — Up Assabet. 

The ferns which I can see on the bank, apparently all evergreens, are polypody at rock, marginal shield fern, terminal shield fern, and (I think it is) Aspidium spinulosum, which I had not identified. Apparently Aspidium cristatum elsewhere.

I can find no bright leaves now in the woods. 

Witch hazel, etc., are withered, turned brown, or yet green. 

See by the droppings in the woods where small migrating birds have roosted. 

I see a squirrel's nest in a white pine, recently made, on the hillside near the witch-hazels. 

The high bank-side is mostly covered with fallen leaves of pines and hemlocks, etc. 

The above-named evergreen ferns are so much the more conspicuous on that pale-brown ground. They stand out all at once and are seen to be evergreen; their character appears. 

The fallen pine-needles, as well as other leaves, now actually paint the surface of the earth brown in the woods, covering the green and other colors, and the few evergreen plants on the forest floor stand out distinct and have a rare preeminence. 

Sal Cummings, a thorough countrywoman, conversant with nuts and berries, calls the soapwort gentian “blue vengeance,” mistaking the word. A masculine wild eyed woman of the fields. Somebody has her daguerreotype. When Mr. — was to lecture on Kansas, she was sure “she wa'n't going to hear him. None of her folks had ever had any.”

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 23, 1857

Sal Cummings, a thorough countrywoman, conversant with nuts and berries' See October 5, 1856 ("Sally Cummings and Mike Murray are out on the Hill collecting apples and nuts. Do they not rather belong to such children of nature than to those who have merely bought them with their money?")