The woods about the pond are now a perfect October picture.

October 19.

P. M. — To Pine Hill for chestnuts. 

October 19, 2015

It is a very pleasant afternoon, quite still and cloudless, with a thick haze concealing the distant hills. Does not this haze mark the Indian summer?

The woods about the pond are now a perfect October picture; yet there have been no very bright tints this fall. The young white and the shrub oak leaves were withered before the frosts came, perhaps by the late drought after the wet spring.

I see at last a few white pine cones open on the trees, but almost all appear to have fallen. The chestnuts are scarce and small and apparently have but just begun to open their burs.

When, returning at 5 o’clock, I pass the pond in the road, I see the sun, which is about entering the grosser hazy atmosphere above the western horizon, brilliantly reflected in the pond, —a dazzling sheen, a bright golden shimmer. His broad sphere extended stretches the whole length of the pond toward me. In the extreme distance, I see a few sparkles of the gold on the dark surface; then begins a regular and solid column of shimmering gold, straight as a rule, but at one place, where a breeze strikes the surface from one side, it is remarkably spread or widened, then recovers its straightness again . . . Of course, if there were eyes enough to occupy all the east shore, the whole pond would be seen as one dazzling shimmering lake of melted gold.

I measure the depth of the needles under the pitch pines east of the railroad (behind the old shanties), which, as I remember, are about thirty years old. In one place it is three quarters of an inch in all to the soil, in another one and a quarter, and in a hollow under a larger pine about four inches. I think the thickness of the needles, old and new, is not more than one inch there on an average.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 19, 1855

It is a very pleasant afternoon, quite still and cloudless, with a thick haze concealing the distant hills. Does not this haze mark the Indian summer? See October 20, 1858 (“Another remarkably warm and pleasant day, if not too hot for walking; 74° at 2 P. M. . . .There is a haze between me and the nearest woods, as thick as the thickest in summer.”)