The State Muster

September 8. 

The 7th, 8th, and 9th, the State muster is held here.

The only observation I have to make is that [Concord] is fuller of dust and more uninhabitable than I ever knew it to be before. Not only the walls, fences, and houses are thickly covered with dust, but the fields and meadows and bushes; and the pads in the river for half a mile from the village are white with it. From a mile or two distant you see a cloud of dust over the town and extending thence to the muster-field. 

I went to the store the other day to buy a bolt for our front door, for, as I told the storekeeper, the Governor was coming here. "Aye," said he, "and the Legislature too." "Then I will take two bolts," said I. He said that there had been a steady demand for bolts and locks of late, for our protectors were coming. 

The surface of the roads for three to six inches in depth is a light and dry powder like ashes. 

P. M. — To Fair Haven Pond. 

Grapes are turning purple, but are not ripe. 

I see the black head and neck of a little dipper in mid stream, a few rods before my boat. It disappears, and though I search carefully, I cannot detect it again. It is undoubtedly hidden mid the weeds — pads, flags, and pontederia, etc. — along the shore. 

Ducks more common.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 8, 1859

The 7th, 8th, and 9th, the State muster is held here See May 27, 1857 ("I hear the sound of fife and drum the other side of the village, and am reminded that it is May Training. Some thirty young men are marching in the streets in two straight sections, with each a very heavy and warm cap for the season on his head and a bright red stripe down the legs of his pantaloons, and at their head march two with white stripes down their pants, one beating a drum, the other blowing a fife. ")

I see the black head and neck of a little dipper in mid stream See September 9, 1858 ("At length the walker who sits meditating on a distant bank sees the little dipper sail out from amid the weeds and busily dive for its food along their edge: Yet ordinary eyes might range up and down the river all day and never detect its small black head above the water. ")