Sally Cummings and Mike Murray are out on the Hill collecting apples and nuts.

October 5. 

Sunday. P. M. — To Hill and over the pastures westward. 

Sally Cummings and Mike Murray are out on the Hill collecting apples and nuts. Do they not rather belong to such children of nature than to those who have merely bought them with their money? There are few apples for them this year, however, and it is too early for walnuts (too late for hazelnuts). The grapes are generally gone, and their vines partly bare and yellowed, though without frost. 

I amuse myself on the hilltop with pulling to pieces and letting fly the now withered and dry pasture thistle tops. They have a much coarser pappus than the milkweeds. I am surprised, amid these perfectly withered and bleached thistles, to see one just freshly in flower. 

The autumnal dandelion is now comparatively scarce there. 

In the huckleberry pasture, by the fence of old barn boards, I notice many little pale-brown dome-shaped (puckered to a centre beneath) puff-balls, which emit their dust. When you pinch them, a smoke-like brown dust (snuff-colored) issues from the orifice at their top, just like smoke from a chimney. It is so fine and light that it rises into the air and is wafted away like smoke. They are low Oriental domes or mosques. Sometimes crowded together in nests, like a collection of humble cottages on the moor, in the coal pit or Numidian style; for there is suggested some humble hearth beneath, from which this smoke comes up, as it were the homes of slugs and crickets. 

They please me not a little by their resemblance to rude dome-shaped, turf-built cottages on the plain, wherein some humble but everlasting life is lived. Amid the low and withering grass or the stubble there they are gathered, and their smoke ascends between the legs of the herds and the traveller. I imagine a hearth and pot, and some snug but humble family passing its Sunday evening beneath each one. Some, when you press them harder, emit clear water — the relics of rain or dew — along with the dust, which last, how ever, has no affinity for it, but is quite dry and smoke like. 

I locate there at once all that is simple and admirable in human life. There is no virtue which their roofs exclude. I imagine with what contentment and faith I could come home to them at evening. I see some not yet ripe, still entire and rounded at top. When I break them open, they are found to be quite soggy, of a stringy white consistency, almost cream-like, riper and yellowish at top, where they will burst by and by. Many have holes eaten into them. On one I find a slug feeding, with a little hole beneath him, and a cricket has eaten out the whole inside of another in which he is housed. This before they are turned to dust. Large chocolate-colored ones have long since burst and are spread out wide like a shallow dish. 

Crickets are seen now moving slowly about in the paths, often with their heads only concealed in a burrow, as if looking out for winter quarters. I saw, on my return, a dozen crickets of various sizes gathered on an apple paring which I had dropped in the path when I came along. 

The sweet-briar rose hips are very handsome now, but these hips do not deserve to be coupled with haws as articles of food, even in extremities. They are very dry, hard, seedy, and unpalatable. I see some fresh-grown callitriche in some clear well-filled leafy pools which are commonly dry at this season.

The singular long pointed reddish bulbs in the axils of the Lysimachia stricta are one of the signs of the season, cool and late. 

It is well to find your employment and amusement in simple and homely things. These wear best and yield most. I think I would rather watch the motions of these cows in their pasture for a day, which I now see all headed one way and slowly advancing, — watch them and project their course carefully on a chart, and report all their behavior faithfully, — than wander to Europe or Asia and watch other motions there; for it is only ourselves that we report in either case, and perchance we shall report a more restless and worthless self in the latter case than in the first.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 5, 1856

Sally Cummings and Mike Murray are out on the Hill collecting apples and nuts. See October 23, 1857 ("Sal Cummings, a thorough countrywoman, conversant with nuts and berries, calls the soapwort gentian “blue vengeance,” mistaking the word. A masculine wild eyed woman of the fields. Somebody has her daguerreotype..")

Long pointed reddish bulbs in the axils of the Lysimachia stricta are one of the signs of the season . . . October 16, 1853 ("The Lysimachia stricta, with its long bulb-lets in the axils, how green and fresh by the shore of the pond!")

These cows in their pasture . . . which I now see all headed one way and slowly advancing. See July 5, 1853 ("Such a habit have cows in a pasture of moving forward while feeding."); September 27, 1851 ("The cows have been turned on to the meadow, but they gradually desert it, all feeding one way.")