Nightfall after the rain

June 6. 

On river, up Assabet,  after the rain. Rain still (the second day) clears up before night, and so cool that many have fires.  

How full the air of sound at sunset  and just after, at the end of a rain-storm!  Every bird seems to be singing in the wood across the steam.  All sounds are more distinctly heard.

As the light is obscured after sunset, the birds rapidly cease their songs, and the swallows cease to flit over the river.  

Soon the bats are seen taking the places of the swallows, flying back and forth like them.  

After the bats, half an hour after sunset, the water-bugs begin to spread themselves over the stream, - now, when it is difficult to see them or the dimples they make, except when you look toward the reflected western sky.

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, June 6, 1860

Half an hour after sunset the water-bugs begin to spread themselves over the stream, when it is difficult to see them. See June 2, 1860 ("Water-bugs dimple the surface now quite across the river, in the moonlight, for it is a full moon.") See also  A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Water-bug (Gyrinus) and Skaters (Hydrometridae)

The reflected western sky. See October 20, 1858 ("There is one advantage in walking eastward these afternoons, at least, that in returning you may have the western sky before you."); November 15, 1853 (“Just after sundown, the waters become suddenly smooth, and the clear yellow light of the western sky is . . . reflected in the water . . . diffusing light from below as well as above”); December 25, 1858 ("How full of soft, pure light the western sky now, after sunset!”); January 17, 1852 ("In proportion as I have celestial thoughts, is the necessity for me to be out and behold the western sky sunset these winter days."); August 2, 1854 (“I am compelled to stand to write where a soft, faint light from the western sky came in between two willows.”); August 5, 1851 (“The light from the western sky is stronger still than that of the moon”) See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  the Western Sky