A sudden and decided progress in the season.

April 29. 

Purple finch sings on R. W. E.'s trees. 

P. M. — To Dugan Desert. 

At Tarbell's watering-place, see a dandelion, its conspicuous bright-yellow disk in the midst of a green space on the moist bank. It is thus I commonly meet with the earliest dandelion set in the midst of some liquid green patch. It seems a sudden and decided progress in the season. 

On the pitch pines beyond John Hosmer's, I see old cones within two feet of the ground on the trunk, — sometimes a circle of them around it, — which must have been formed on the young tree some fifteen years ago. 

Sweet-fern at entrance of Ministerial Swamp. 

A partridge there drums incessantly. C. says it makes his heart beat with it, or he feels it in his breast. 

I find that that clayey-looking soil on which the baeomyces grows is a very thin crust on common sand only. 

I have seen that pretty little hair-cap moss (Pogonatum brevicaule?) for a fortnight out at least; like little pine trees; the staminate pretty, cup-shaped and shorter. 

A steel-blue-black flattish beetle, which, handled, imparted a very disagreeable carrion-like scent to fingers. 

Miles's Pond is running off. The sweet-gale, willows, etc., which have been submerged and put back, begin to show themselves and are trying to catch up with their fellows. 

I am surprised to see how some blackberry pastures and other fields are filling up with pines, trees which I thought the cows had almost killed two or three years ago; so that what was then a pasture is now a young wood-lot. 

A little snow still lies in the road in one place, the relic of the snow of the 21st.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 29, 1857

See a dandelion, its conspicuous bright-yellow disk in the midst of a green space on the moist bank. See April 29, 1852 ("F. Wheeler, Jr., saw dandelions in bloom the 20th of April. Garfield's folks used them for greens . They grew in a springy place behind Brigham' s in the Corner.") April 29, 1855 ("Dandelions out yesterday, at least.");April 29, 1859 ("First observe the dandelion well out in R. W. E.'s yard"). See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Dandelion in Spring

C. says it makes his heart beat with it, or he feels it in his breast. See April 25, 1854 ("The first partridge drums in one or two places, as if the earth's pulse now beat audibly with the increased flow of life. It slightly flutters all Nature and makes her heart palpitate.”)