I can hardly be sure whether I hear it still, or remember it, it so rings in my ears.

August 12. 

When I came down-stairs this morning, it raining hard and steadily, I found an Irishman sitting with his coat on his arm in the kitchen, waiting to see me. He wanted to inquire what I thought the weather would be to-day! I sometimes ask my aunt, and she consults the almanac. So we shirk the responsibility.

P. M. — To the Miles blueberry swamp and White Pond. 

It clears up before noon and is now very warm and clear. When I look at the sparrows on the fences, yellow-browed and bay-wings, they all have their bills open and are panting with heat. Apparently the end of the very wet weather we have had about a fortnight. 

At Clamshell I see more of, I think, the same clear breasted, yellow-browed sparrows which I saw there the other day and thought the Fringilla passerina, and now I hear, from some thereabouts, the seringo note. 

As I stand on the bank there, I find suddenly that I hear, low and steady, under all other sounds, the creak of the mole cricket by the riverside. It has a peculiarly late sound, suggestive of the progress of the year. It is the voice which comes up steadily at this season from that narrow sandy strip between the meadow and the water’s edge. You might think it issued from that small frog, the only living thing you see, which sits so motionless on the sand. But the singer is wholly out of sight in his gallery under the surface. 

Creak creak, creak creak, creak creak, creak creak. 

It is a sound associated with the declining year and recalls the moods of that season. It is so unobtrusive yet universal a sound, so underlying the other sounds which fill the air, —the song of birds, rustling of leaves, dry hopping sound of grasshoppers, etc., —that now, in my chamber, I can hardly be sure whether I hear it still, or remember it, it so rings in my ears. 

It is surprising how young birds, especially sparrows of all kinds, abound now, and bobolinks and wood pewees and kingbirds. All weeds and fences and bare trees are alive with them. The sparrows and bobolinks are seen surging over or falling behind the weeds and fences, even as grasshoppers now skip from the grass and leaves in your path. 

That very handsome high-colored fine purple grass grows particularly on dry and rather unproductive soil just above the edge of the meadows, on the base of the hills, where the hayer does not deign to swing his scythe. He carefully gets the meadow-hay and the richer grass that borders it, but leaves this fine purple mist for the walker’s harvest. 

Higher up the hill, perchance, grow blackberries and johnswort and neglected and withered and wiry June-grass. Twenty or thirty rods off it appears as a high-colored purple border above the meadow, like a berry’s stain laid on close and thick, but if you pluck one plant you will be surprised to find how thin it is and how little color it has. What puny causes combine to produce such decided effects! 

There is ripeness in its color as in the poke stem. It grows in waste places, perhaps on the edge of blackberry-fields, a thin, fine, spreading grass, left by the mower. It oftenest grows in scattered rounded tufts a foot in diameter, especially on gentle slopes.

I see a hen-harrier (female) pursued by a red-wing, etc., circling low and far off over the meadow. She is a peculiar and distinct reddish brown on the body beneath. 

All farmers are complaining of the catching weather. I see some of their hay, which is spread, afloat in the meadow. 

This year the fields have not yet worn a parched and withered look. 

I perceive that some high blueberries have a peculiar and decided bitter taste, which makes them almost in edible. Some of the blueberries growing sparingly on recent sprouts are very large. I eat the blueberry, but I am also interested in the rich-looking glossy black choke-berries which nobody eats, but which bend down the bushes on every side,—sweetish berries with a dry, and so choking, taste. Some of the bushes are more than a dozen feet high. 

The note of the wood pewee is a prominent and common one now. You see old and young together.

As I sit on the high bank overlooking White Pond, I am surprised at the number of birds about me, — wood pewees, singing so sweetly on a pine; chickadees, uttering their phebe notes, apparently with their young too; the pine warbler, singing; robins, restless and peeping; and a Maryland yellow-throat, hopping within a bush closely. 

Some boys bathing shake the whole pond. I see the undulations a third across it though they are out of sight, and, if it were smooth, might perhaps see them quite across. 

Hear what I have called the alder locust (?) as I return over the causeway, and probably before this. 

It is pleasant enough, for a change, to walk in the woods without a path in a wet and mizzling afternoon, as we did the 10th, winding amid the wet bushes, which wet our legs through, and seeing ever and anon a wood frog skip over the dead and wet leaves, and the various colored fungi, — rejoicing in fungi. (I saw some large ones, green, that afternoon.) We are glad to come to more open spaces where we can walk dry on a carpet of pine leaves. 

Saw a Viola pedata blooming again.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 12, 1858

Low and steady, under all other sounds, the creak of the mole cricket by the riverside. See August 23, 1857 ("The mole cricket nowadays.”); August 22, 1856 ("The creak of the mole cricket is heard along the shore."); August 6, 1855 ("The mole cricket creaks along the shore.”)

I see-a hen-harrier (female) pursued by a red-wing, etc., circling low and far off over the meadow. She is a peculiar and distinct reddish brown on the body beneath. See June 8, 1858 ("A red-wing and a kingbird are soon in pursuit of the hawk, which proves, I think, that she meddles with their nests or themselves.”); August 19, 1853 (" A great reddish-brown marsh hawk circling over the meadow there.”)

The note of the wood pewee is a prominent and common one now. You see old and young together. See August 18, 1858 ("I sit under the oaks at the east end of Hubbard’s Grove, and hear two wood pewees singing close by. . . . One appeared to answer the other, and sometimes they both sung together, — even as if the old were teaching her young. ") and  note to August 18, 1860 ("The note of the wood pewee sounds prominent of late.")

Viola pedata blooming again. See note to September 4, 1856 (“Viola pedata again.”)