Perambulated Carlisle line.

September 19.

Perambulated Carlisle line.

Large-flowered bidens, or beggar-ticks, or bur-marigold, now abundant by riverside.

Found the bound stones on Carlisle by the river all or mostly tipped over by the ice and water, like the pitch pines about Walden Pond.

Grapes very abundant along that line.

The soapwort gentian now.

In an old pasture, now grown up to birches and other trees, followed the cow-paths to the old apple trees.

Mr. Isaiah Green of Carlisle, who lives nearest to the Kibbe Place, can remember when there were three or four houses around him (he is nearly eighty years old and has always lived there and was born there); now he is quite retired, and the nearest road is scarcely used at all.

He spoke of one old field, now grown up, which [we] were going through, as the "hog-pasture," formerly.

He found the meadows so dry that it was thought to be a good time to burn out the moss.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 19, 1851

Perambulated Carlisle line. See September 12, 1851 (" On Monday, the 15th instant, I am going to perambulate the bounds of the town. ...It is a sort of reconnoissance of its frontiers authorized by the central government of the town, which will bring the surveyor in contact with whatever wild inhabitant or wilderness its territory embraces."); September 15, 1851 ("Commenced perambulating the town bounds."); September 16, 1851 ("The inhabitants of Lincoln yield sooner than usual to the influence of the rising generation, and are a mixture of rather simple but clever with a well-informed and trustworthy people."); September 17, 1851 ("Perambulated the Lincoln line."); September 18, 1851 ("Perambulated Bedford line."); September 20, 1851 ("A fatal coarseness is the result of mixing in the trivial affairs of men.. . . I feel inexpressibly begrimed."); September 21, 1851 ("Here was the cider-mill, and there the orchard, and there the hog-pasture; and so men lived, and ate, and drank, and passed away, — like vermin.")

Large-flowered bidens, or beggar-ticks. See October 12, 1851 ("The seeds of the bidens, — without florets, — or beggar-ticks, with four-barbed awns like hay-hooks, now adhere to your clothes, so that you are all bristling with them. Certainly they adhere to nothing so readily as to woolen cloth, as if in the creation of them the invention of woolen clothing by man had been foreseen. How tenacious of its purpose to spread and plant its race! By all methods nature secures this end, whether by the balloon, or parachute, or hook, or barbed spear like this, or mere lightness which the winds can waft")

The soapwort gentian now. See September 19, 1852 ("The soapwort gentian cheers and surprises, -- solid bulbs of blue from the shade, the stale grown purplish. It abounds along the river, after so much has been mown") See also September 6, 1857 ("Soapwort gentian, out not long");;September 8, 1852 ("Gentiana saponaria out."); September 22, 1852 ("The soapwort gentian the flower of the river-banks now.") September 25, 1857 ("You notice now the dark-blue dome of the soapwort gentian in cool and shady places under the bank.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Soapwort Gentian 

Mr. Isaiah Green of Carlisle . . .spoke of one old field, now grown up . . . as the "hog-pasture," formerly. See June 10, 1853 ("Crossed on to the old Carlisle road by the house north of Isaiah Green‘s, and then across the road through the woods to the Paul Adams house by Bateman‘s Pond. Saw a hog-pasture of a dozen acres in the woods, with thirty or forty large hogs and a shelter for them at night, a half-mile east of the last house, — something rare in these days here abouts.)