I cannot excuse myself for using the stone.

October 23. 

P. M. — To Saw Mill Brook. 

The streets are strewn with buttonwood leaves, which rustle under your feet, and the children are busy raking them into heaps, some for bonfires. 

The large elms are bare; not yet the buttonwoods. 

The sugar maples on the Common stand dense masses of rich yellow leaves with a deep scarlet blush,—far more than blush. They are remarkably brilliant this year on the exposed surfaces. The last are as handsome as any trees in the street. 

I am struck with the handsome form and clear, though very pale, say lemon, yellow of the black birch leaves on sprouts in the woods, finely serrate and distinctly plaited from the midrib. 

I plucked three leaves from the end of a red maple shoot, an underwood, each successively smaller than the last, the brightest and clearest scarlet that I ever saw. These and the birch attracted universal admiration when laid on a sheet of white paper and passed round the supper table, and several inquired particularly where I found them. I never saw such colors painted. They were without spot; ripe leaves.

The small willows two or three feet high by the road side in woods have some rich, deep chrome-yellow leaves with a gloss. The sprouts are later to ripen and richer-colored. 

The pale whitish leaves (I horehound in damp grassy paths, with its spicy fruit in the axils, are tinged with purple or lake more or less. - 

Going through what was E. Hosmer’s muck-hole pond, now almost entirely dry, the surface towards the shore is covered with a dry crust more or less cracked, which crackles under my feet. I strip it up like bark in long pieces, three quarters of an inch thick and a foot wide and two long. It appears to be composed of fine mosses and perhaps utricularia and the like, such as grow in water. A little sphagnum is quite conspicuous, erect but dry, in it. 

Now is the time for chestnuts. A stone cast against the trees shakes them down in showers upon one’s head and shoulders. 

But I cannot excuse myself for using the stone. It is not innocent, it is not just, so to maltreat the tree that feeds us. I am not disturbed by considering that if I thus shorten its life I shall not enjoy its fruit so long, but am prompted to a more innocent course by motives purely of humanity. I sympathize with the tree, yet I heaved a big stone against the trunks like a robber,—not too good to commit murder. I trust that I shall never do it again.


These gifts should be accepted, not merely with gentleness, but with a certain humble gratitude. The tree whose fruit we would obtain should not be too rudely shaken even. It is not a time of distress, when a little haste and violence even might be pardoned. It is worse than boorish, it is criminal to inflict an unnecessary injury on the tree that feeds or shadows us. 

Old trees are our parents, and our parents’ parents, perchance. If you would learn the secrets of Nature, you must practice more humanity than others. The thought that I was robbing myself by injuring the tree did not occur to me, but I was affected as if I had cast a rock at a sentient being, — with a duller sense than my own, it is true, but yet a distant relation. 

Behold a man cutting down a tree to come at the fruit! What is the moral of such an act? 

Faded white ferns now at Saw Mill Brook. They press yellow or straw-color.

Ah! we begin old men in crime. Would that we might grow innocent at last as the children of light! 

A downy woodpecker on an apple tree utters a sharp, shrill, rapid tea te t, t, t, t t t t t.

Is that tall weed in Mrs. Brooks’s yard Cacalia suaveolens?? Yet stem more angled than grooved; four or five feet high. Some time ago. 

Cousin Charles writes that his horse drew 5286 pounds up the hill from Hale’s factory, at Cattle-Show in Haverhill the other day.

H. D. Thorerau, Journal,  October 23, 1855

Now is the time for chestnuts. A stone cast against the trees shakes them down in showers upon one’s head and shoulders. See October 24, 1857 ("I hear the dull thump of heavy stones against the trees from far through the rustling wood, where boys are ranging for nuts. ")

A downy woodpecker on an apple tree utters a sharp, shrill, rapid tea te t, t, t, t t t t t. See October 23, 1853 ("I see a downy woodpecker tapping an apple tree, and hear, when I have passed, his sharp, metallic note."); December 5, 1853 ("See and hear a downy woodpecker on an apple tree. Have not many winter birds, like this and the chickadee, a sharp note like tinkling glass or icicles?") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Downy Woodpecker