July 14, 2015
The sea has that same streaked look that our meadows have in a gale.
Go to Bay side. Stench of blackfish. The lobster holds on to the pot himself. Throw away the largest. Find French crown.
I was walking close to the water’s edge just after the tide had begun to fall, looking for shells and pebbles, and observed on the still wet sand, under the abrupt caving edge of the bank, this dark-colored round, flat — old button? I cheated my companion by holding up round Scutella parma on the bars, between my fingers.“
High hill — where town-house?—in Provincetown; according to big map, 109 feet high. When numerous you may count about eighty vessels at once.
A little kelp and rockweed grow offshore here.
Nest of grass-bird, — grass stubble, lined with grass and root-fibres, three eggs half hatched, under a tuft of beach-grass, a quarter of a mile inland. Have an egg.
Measured apple trees at Uncle Sam’s.
They say the keeper of Billingsgate Light a few days ago put his initials in [a] thousand dollars’ worth of blackfish in one morning, and got that of Provincetown for them. Another, some years ago, got one hundred in a morning, and sold them for fifteen hundred dollars. Got a fox’s skull. Thirty-six feet from base to centre of this light. Light called in book one hundred and seventy-one feet above sea?
Found washed up, and saw swimming in the cove where we bathed, young mackerel two inches long.
Uncle Sam says there is most drift in the spring; so in our river. He calls his apple trees “he.”
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 14, 1855
No comments:
Post a Comment