Gossamer on the button-bushes.

October 17. 

P. M. —Up river. 

October 17, 2023

A fine Indian-summer afternoon. 

There is much gossamer on the button-bushes, now bare of leaves, and on the sere meadow-grass, looking toward the sun, in countless parallel lines, like the ropes which connect the masts of a vessel. 

I see the roots of the great yellow lily lying on the mud where they have made a ditch in John Hosmer’s meadow for the sake of the mud, gray-colored when old and dry. Some are three and a half inches in diameter, with their great eyes or protuberant shoulders where the leaf-stalks stood in quincunx order around them. What rank vigor they suggest!

I see behind (or rather in front of) me as I row home a little dipper appear in mid-river, as if I had passed right over him. It dives while I look, and I do not see it come up anywhere.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 17, 1855

A fine Indian-summer afternoon. There is much gossamer . . . looking toward the sun, in countless parallel lines, like the ropes which connect the masts of a vessel. See October 18, 1855 (" To-day my shoes are whitened with the gossamer which I noticed yesterday on the meadow-grass."); October 19, 1860 ("Indian-summer-like and gossamer.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Gossamer Days

I see a little dipper appear in mid-river, It dives while I look, and I do not see it come up anywhere. See September 8, 1859 ("I see the black head and neck of a little dipper in mid stream, a few rods before my boat. It disappears, and though I search carefully, I cannot detect it again.")