The new steam-whistle music.

August 7. 

Hemp, perhaps a week. 

Heard this forenoon what I thought at first to be children playing on pumpkin stems in the next yard, but it turned out to be the new steam-whistle music, what they call the Calliope (!) in the next town. It sounded still more like the pumpkin stem near at hand, only a good deal louder. Again I mistook it for an instrument in the house or at the door, when it was a quarter of a mile off, from habit locating it by its loudness. At Acton, six miles off, it sounded like some new seraphim in the next house with the blinds closed. All the milkmen and their horses stood still to hear it. The horses stood it remarkably well. It was not so musical as the ordinary whistle. 

P. M. — With a berry party, ride to Conantum. 

At Blackberry Steep, apparently an early broad- leafed variety of Desmodium paniculatum, two or three days. This and similar plants are common there and may almost name the place. The D. rotundifolium is there abundant; also, beside, Lespedeza hirta and capitata, the elliptic-oblong L. violacea and the angustata, as also at Heywood Peak. All these plants seem to love a dry open hillside, a steep one. Are rarely upright, but spreading, wand-like. 

Aster patens, a day or more. Inula, some time. Mulgedium, perhaps a fortnight. Eupatorium sessilifolium, apparently about August 5th. 

I suspect that I see but one species of smooth-stemmed grape as yet. 

I must contrast the Galium circoezans and pilosum (?) more carefully. Vide if the first ever has purple flowers. The only difference, perhaps, that I yet notice is that the leaves of the latter are scarcely three-nerved and are more rounded or obovate, and it is a later plant. 

I see that common gall on goldenrods now on an S. coesia. 

The river has been raised by the rain, and water stands still in low grass ground. 

The leaves in low land, as of the mulgedium, are white with mildew, owing  the continued dampness of dog-days. One mulgedium at Corner Spring is at least ten feet high and hollow all the way. 

Those who have weak eyes complain of the darkness of the late dog-days.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 7, 1856

Hemp, perhaps a week. See August 28, 1852 ("Hemp still in blossom.”)

I see that common gall on goldenrods now . . . See July 30, 1853 ("It suggests that Nature is a kind of gall, that the Creator stung her and man is the grub she is destined to house and feed.”)