Cool rain

June 5.

Northeast wind and rain, steady rain.

Hemlock bead-work handsome, but hardly yet large ones.

When I open my window at night I hear the peeping of hylodes distinctly through the rather cool rain

(as also some the next morning ), but not of toads;
more hylodes than in the late very warm evenings when the toads were heard most numerously.
The hylodes evidently love the cooler nights of spring; the toads, the warm days and nights of May.

Now it requires a cool (and better if wet) night, which will silence the toads, to make the hylodes distinct.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 5, 1860

Hemlock bead-work handsome. See June 5, 1853 ("The fresh light green shoots of the hemlocks have now grown half an inch or an inch, spotting the trees, contrasting with the dark green of last year's foliage") See also June 7, 1860 ("the bead-work of the hemlock"); June 11, 1859 ("Hemlocks are about at height of their beauty, with their fresh growth.") June 26, 1860 ("The hemlocks are too much grown now and are too dark a green to show the handsomest bead-work by contrast.")

At night I hear the peeping of hylodes distinctly through the rather cool rain. . . but not of toads See May 6, 1858 ("Now, at night, all ring together, the toads ringing through the day, the hylodes beginning in earnest toward night and the palustris at evening. I think that the different epochs in the revolution of the seasons may perhaps be best marked by the notes of reptiles."); June 11, 1860 ("At 9 p. m. , 54°, and no toads nor peepers heard.") See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The first frogs to begin calling