I drink at every cooler spring in my walk these afternoons / the earliest bobolinks of the season.

July 12.

P. M. — To Equiseium hyemale.

Those little minnows, a third or half inch long or more, which I catch when bathing, hovering over open sandy spaces, as here at Clamshell, appear to be little shiners. When left dry on my hand, they can toss themselves three or four inches with a spring of their tails, and so often get into the water again. Small as they are, it is rather difficult to catch them, they dodge your hands so fast.

I drink at every cooler spring in my walk these afternoons and love to eye the bottom there, with its pebbly caddis-cases, or its white worms, or perchance a luxurious frog cooling himself next my nose. 

Sometimes the farmer, foreseeing haying, has been prudent enough to sink a tub in one, which secures a clear deep space. 

It would be worth the while, methinks, to make a map of the town with all the good springs on it, indicating whether they were cool, perennial, copious, pleasantly located, etc. The farmer is wont to celebrate the virtues of some one on his own farm above all others. Some cool rills in the meadows should be remembered also, for some such in deep, cold, grassy meadows are as cold as springs. I have sometimes drank warm or foul water, not knowing such cold streams were at hand. By many a spring I know where to look for the dipper or glass which some mower has left.

When a spring has been allowed to fill up, to be muddied by cattle, or, being exposed to the sun by cutting down the trees and bushes, to dry up, it affects me sadly, like an institution going to decay. Sometimes I see, on one side the tub, — the tub overhung with various wild plants and flowers, its edge almost completely concealed even from the searching eye, — the white sand freshly cast up where the spring is bubbling in. 

Often I sit patiently by the spring I have cleaned out and deepened with my hands, and see the foul water rapidly dissipated like a curling vapor and giving place to the cool and clear. 

Sometimes I can look a yard or more into a crevice under a rock, toward the sources of a spring in a hillside, and see it come cool and copious with incessant murmuring down to the light. There are few more refreshing sights in hot weather. 

I find many strawberries deep in the grass of the meadow near this Hosmer Spring; then proceed on my way with reddened and fragrant fingers, till it gets washed off at new springs. 

It is always pleasant to go over the bare brow of Lupine Hill and see the river and meadows thence. 

It is exceedingly sultry this afternoon, and few men are abroad. The cows stand up to their bellies in the river, lashing their sides with their tails from time to time. 

A strong and wholesome fragrance now from the vegetation as I go by overgrown paths through the swamp west of Nut Meadow. 

Equisetum hyemale has been out a good while; is mostly effete, but some open yet. Some have several flower-spikes on the sides near the top, but most one at top, of the last year's plant. This year's shoots a foot high, more or less. 

All the Pyrola secunda I can find is out of bloom. 

The Chimaphila umbellata flower-buds make a very pretty umbel, of half a dozen small purple balls surmounted by a green calyx. They contrast prettily with the glossy green leaves. 

A song sparrow's nest in a small clump of alder, two feet from ground! Three or four eggs. 

I hear the occasional link note from the earliest bobolinks of the season, — a day or two.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 12, 1857

Those little minnows, a third or half inch long or more, which I catch when bathing at Clamshell.   See June 27, 1853 ("Saw a little pickerel with a minnow in his mouth. It was a beautiful little silver-colored minnow, two inches long, with a broad stripe down the middle."); June 28, 1855 ("Shoals of minnows a half-inch long."); July 16, 1856 ("I See many young shiners (?) (they have the longitudinal bar), one to two and a half inches long"); July 17, 1856 ("Bathed at Clamshell. See great schools of minnows, apparently shiners, hovering in the clear shallow next the shore . . . a broad, distinct black band along sides (which methinks marks the shiner) and note to May 3, 1860 ("little fishes one and a half to two inches long, with a very distinct black line along the sides, which I should have called brook minnows")  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Luxury of Bathing

I drink at every cooler spring . . . and love to eye the bottom there, with its pebbly caddis-cases . . . See July 17, 1856 "Stooping to drink at the Hosmer Spring, I saw a hundred caddis-cases, of light-colored pebbles, at the bottom, and a dozen or twenty crawled half-way up the side of the tub, apparently on their way out to become perfect insects.")

Some cool rills in the meadows should be remembered also, for some such in deep, cold, grassy meadows are as cold as springs. See August 19, 1852 ("Here [at the Corner Spring] is a little brook of very cold spring-water, rising a few rods distant, sometimes running underground, meandering exceedingly, with a gray sandy and pebbly bottom, flowing through this dense swampy thicket.. . . The water has the coldness it acquired in the bowels of the earth."); October 10, 1860("In August, '55, I levelled for the artificial pond at Sleepy Hollow. They dug gradually for three or four years and completed the pond last year, '59. It is now about a dozen rods long by five or six wide and two or three deep, and is supplied by copious springs in the meadow.")

The Chimaphila umbellata flower-buds make a very pretty umbel, of half a dozen small purple balls surmounted by a green calyx. They contrast prettily with the glossy green leaves. See February 16, 1854 ("It must be the leaves of the Chimaphila umbellate, spotted wintergreen, which Channing left here day before yesterday.Snows again this morning."); February 16, 1855 (“I see where probably rabbits have nibbled of the leaves of the Wintergreen.”); May 21, 1860 ("Wintergreen had started the 18th at least");  July 3, 1852 ("The Chimaphila umbellata, wintergreen, must have been in blossom some time. The back side of its petals, "cream colored tinged with purple," which is turned toward the beholder, while the face is toward the earth, is the handsomest. It is a very pretty little chandelier of a flower, fit to adorn the forest floor.”); July 8, 1857 ("Chimaphila umbellata, apparently a day or two."); July 17, 1857 ("An abundance of chimaphila in bloom. It is a beautiful flower, with its naked umbel of crystalline purplish-white flowers, their disks at an angle with the horizon. On its lower side a ring of purple (or crimson) scales at the base of its concave petals, around the large, green, sticky ovary."); July 24, 1856 ("Chimaphila maculata, three flowers, apparently but few days, while the umbellata is quite done.");  November 16, 1858 (“Methinks the wintergreen, pipsissewa, is our handsomest evergreen, so liquid glossy green and dispersed almost all over the woods.”); December 7, 1853 ("The liquid wet glossy leaves of the Chimaphila (winter or snow-loving) umbellata, with its dry fruit.")

Often I sit patiently by the spring I have cleaned out . . . See July 11, 1857("Am surprised to find the water of Corner Spring spoiled for the present, however much I clear it out, by the numbers of dead and dying frogs in it (Rana palustris). ")

I hear the occasional link note from the earliest bobolinks of the season . . . See July 11, 1856 ('Hear now the link of bobolinks, and see quite a flock of red-wing blackbirds and young. "); July 15, 1854 ("I hear the link link of the bobolink,. . . . Many birds begin to fly in small flocks like grown-up broods."); July 19, 1855 ("Young bobolinks; one of the first autumnalish notes.") July 15, 1856 ("Bobolinks are heard — their link, link — above and amid the tall rue which now whitens the meadows.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Bobolink

July 12. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, July 12

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2021