The yellow afternoon of the year.

August 12. 

To Conantum by boat.  To-day there is an uncommonly strong wind, against which I row, yet in shirt-sleeves, trusting to sail back. It is southwest.

The Bidens Beckii yellows the side of the river just below the Hubbard Path, but is hardly yet in fullest flower generally. 

I see goldfinches nowadays on the lanceolate thistles, apparently after the seeds. 

It takes all the heat of the year to produce these yellow flowers. It is the 3 o'clock p. m. of the year when they begin to prevail, — when the earth has absorbed most heat, when melons ripen and early apples and peaches.  It is already the yellowing year.

Viburnum nudum berries generally green, but some, higher and more exposed, of a deep, fiery pink on one cheek and light green on the other, and a very few dark purple or without bloom, black already. I put a bunch with only two or three black ones in my hat, the rest pink or green. When I got home more than half were turned black, — and ripe !! A singularly sudden chemical change. They are a very pretty, irregularly elliptical berry, one side longer than the other, and particularly interesting on account of the mixture of light-green, deep-pink, and dark-purple, and also withered berries, in the same cyme. 

The wind is autumnal and at length compels me to put on my coat. 

I bathe at Hubbard's. The water is rather cool, comparatively. 

Off Holden Woods a baffling counter wind as usual (when I return), but looking up-stream I see the great undulations extending into the calm from above, where the wind blows steadily. 

There are but few haymakers left in the meadows.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 12, 1854

To Conantum by boat. See August 12, 1853 ("To Conantum by boat, berrying, with three ladies.”)

It is the 3 o'clock p. m. of the year . . .It is already the yellowing year. See August 23, 1853 "I am again struck by the perfect correspondence of a day — say an August day — and the year. I think that a perfect parallel may be drawn between the seasons of the day and of the year.”) .

I bathe at Hubbard's. The water is rather cool, comparatively. See September 2, 1854 ("Bathe at Hubbard’s. The water is surprisingly cold on account of the cool weather and rain, but especially since the rain of yesterday morning. It is a very important and remarkable autumnal change. It will not be warm again probably"); September 12, 1854 ("I find it colder again than on the 2d, so that I stay in but a moment.") September 27, 1856 ("Bathed at Hubbard's Bath, but found the water very cold. Bathing about over”)