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.”)

I see at last a few white pine cones open on the trees, but almost all appear to have fallen. See  October 15, 1855 ("Go to look for white pine cones, but see none. ") See also  September 9, 1857 ("To the Hill for white pine cones. Very few trees have any. I can only manage small ones, fifteen or twenty feet high, climbing till I can reach the dangling green pickle-like fruit in my right hand, while I hold to the main stem with my left");, September 18, 1859 ("There is an abundant crop of cones on the white pines this year, and they are now for the most part brown and open . . . How few attend to the ripening and dispersion of the pine seed!"); September 18, 1860 ("White pine cones (a small crop), and all open that I see. [Are they not last year's] ?") . October 6, 1857 ("I see thousands of white pine cones on the ground, fresh light brown, which lately opened and shed their seeds and lie curled up on the ground. The seeds are rather pleasant or nutritious tasting, taken in quantity, like beech nuts, methinks"); October 8, 1856 ("At length I discover some white pine cones, a few . . . are all open, and the seeds, all the sound ones but one, gone. So September is the time to gather them."); October 13, 1860 ("So far as I have observed, if pines or oaks bear abundantly one year they bear little or nothing the next year. This year, so far as I observe, there are scarcely any white pine cones (were there any ?). . . This is a white oak year, not a pine year."); November 3, 1853 ("I see many white pine cones fallen and open, with a few seeds still in them."); November 4, 1855 ("I have failed to find white pine seed this year, though I began to look for it a month ago. The cones were fallen and open. Look the first of September.")