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| January 14, 2018 |
Buffum says he has seen him twenty times, once alone, from the rocks at Little Nahant, when he passed along close to the shore just beneath the surface, and within fifty or sixty feet of him, so that he could have touched him with a very long pole, if he had dared to. Buffum is about sixty, and it should be said, as affecting the value of his evidence, that he is a firm be liever in Spiritualism.
This forenoon I rode to Nahant with Mr. Buffum. All the country bare. A fine warm day; neither snow nor ice, unless you search narrowly for them.
On the way we pass Mr. Alonzo Lewis's cottage. On the top of each of his stone posts is fastened a very perfectly egg-shaped pebble of sienite from Kettle Cove, fifteen to eighteen inches long and of proportionate diameter. I never saw any of that size so perfect.
There are some fifteen of them about his house, and on one flatter, circular one he has made a dial, by which I learned the hour (9.30 A.M.). Says he was surveying once at Kettle Cove, where they form a beach a third of a mile long and two to ten feet deep, and he brought home as many as his horse could draw.
His house is clapboarded with hemlock bark; now some twenty years old. He says that he built it himself.
Called at the shop where lately Samuel Jillson, now of Feltonville, set up birds, – for he is a taxidermist and very skillful; kills his own birds and with blow guns, which he makes and sells, some seven feet long, of glass, using a clay ball. Is said to be a dead shot at six rods!
Warm and fall-like as it is, saw many snow buntings at the entrance to the beach. Saw many black ducks (so Lewis said; may they not have been velvet ducks, i.e. coot?) on the sea. Heard of a flock of geese (!) (may they not have been brant, or some other species?), etc.; ice [?] divers.
On the south side of Little Nahant a large mass of fine pudding-stone. Nahant is said to have been well-wooded, and furnished timber for the wharves of Boston, i. e. to build them. Now a few willows and balm-of-Gileads are the only trees, if you except two or three small cedars. They say others will not grow on account of wind.
The rocks are porphyry, with dykes of dark greenstone in it, and, at the extremity of Nahant, argillaceous slate, very distinctly strati fied, with fossil corallines in it (?), looking like shells. Egg Rock, it seems, has a fertile garden on the top.
P. M. – Rode with J. Buffum, Parker Pillsbury, and Mr. Mudge, a lawyer and geologist of Lynn, into the northwest part of Lynn, to the Danvers line.
After a mile or two, we passed beyond the line of the porphyry into the sienite. The sienite is more rounded. Saw some furrows in sienite. On a ledge of sienite in the woods, the rocky woods near Danvers line, saw many boulders of sienite, part of the same flock of which Ship Rock (so called) in Danvers is one.
One fifteen feet long, ten wide, and five or six deep rested on four somewhat rounded (at least water-worn) stones, eighteen inches in diameter or more, so that you could crawl under it, on the top of a cliff, and projected about eight feet over it, — just as it was dropped by an ice berg.
A fine broad-backed ledge of sienite just beyond, north or northwest, from which we saw Wachusett, Watatic, Monadnock, and the Peterboro Hills.
Also saw where one Boyse (if that is the spelling), a miller in old times, got out millstones in a primitive way, so said an old man who was chopping there. He pried or cracked off a piece of the crust of the ledge, lying horizontal, some sixteen or eighteen inches thick, then made a fire on it about its edges, and, pouring on water, cracked or softened it, so that he could break off the edges and make it round with his sledge. Then he picked a hole through the middle and hammered it as smooth as he could, and it was done.
But this old man said that he had heard old folks say that the stones were so rough in old times that they made a noise like thunder as they revolved, and much grit was mixed with the meal.
Returning down a gully, I thought I would look for a new plant and found at once what I suppose to be Genista tinctoria, dyers’-green-weed, – the stem is quite green, with a few pods and leaves left. It is said to have become naturalized on the hills of Essex County.
Close by was a mass of sienite some seven or eight feet high, with a cedar some two inches thick springing from a mere crack in its top.
Visited Jordan's or the Lynn Quarry (of sienite) on our return, more southerly. The stone cracks very squarely and into very large masses. In one place was a dyke of dark greenstone, of which, joined to the sienite, I brought off two specimens, q. v. The more yellowish and rotten surface stone, lying above the hard and grayer, is called the sap by the quarrymen.
From these rocks and wooded hills three or four miles inland in the northwest edge of Lynn, we had an extensive view of the ocean from Cape Ann to Scituate, and realized how the aborigines, when hunting, berrying, might perchance have looked out thus on the early navigators sailing along the coast, — thousands of them, – when they little suspected it, — how patent to the inhabitants their visit must have been. A vessel could hardly have passed within half a dozen miles of the shore, even, — at one place only, in pleasant weather, — without being seen by hundreds of savages.
Mudge gave me Saugus jasper, graywacke, amyg daloid (greenstone with nodules of feldspar), asbestos, hornstone (?); Buffum some porphyry, epidote, ar gillaceous slate from end of Natant.
Mr. Buffum tells me that they never eat the sea clams without first taking out “the worm,” as it is called, about as large as the small end of a pipe-stem. He supposes it is the penis.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 14, 1858
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