They use this wood for coffins.

May 12. 

May 12, 2018

Chimney swallows. 

P. M. – Up Assabet. - 

On the 8th I noticed a little pickerel recently dead in the river with a slit in its upper lip three quarters of an inch long, apparently where a hook had pulled out. There was a white fuzzy swelling at the end of the snout accordingly, and this apparently had killed it. 

It rained last night, and now I see the elm seed or samarae generally fallen or falling. It not only strews the street but the surface of the river, floating off in green patches to plant other shores. The rain evidently hastened its fall. 

This must be the earliest of trees and shrubs to go to seed or drop its seed. The white maple keys have not fallen. The elm seed floats off down the stream and over the meadows, and thus these trees are found bordering on the stream. 

By the way, I notice that birches near meadows, where there is an exceedingly gentle inclination, grow in more or less parallel lines a foot or two apart, parallel with the shore, apparently the seed having been dropped there either by a freshet or else lodged in the parallel waving hollows of the snow. 

It clears off in the forenoon and promises to be warm in the afternoon, though it at last becomes cool. 

I see now, as I go forth on the river, the first summer shower coming up in the northwest, a dark and well defined cloud with rain falling sheaf-like from it, but fortunately moving off northeast along the horizon, or down the river. The peculiarity seems to be that the sky is not generally overcast, but elsewhere, south and northeast, is a fair-weather sky with only innocent cumuli, etc., in it. 

The thunder-cloud is like the ovary of a perfect flower. Other showers are merely staminiferous or barren. There are twenty barren to one fertile. It is not commonly till thus late in the season that the fertile are seen. In the thunder-cloud, so distinct and condensed, there is a positive energy, and I notice the first as the bursting of the pollen-cells in the flower of the sky. 

Waded through the west-of-rock, or Wheeler, meadow," but I find no frog-spawn there!! I do not even notice tadpoles. Beside that those places are now half full of grass, some pools where was spawn are about dried up (!), as that in Stow's land by railroad. Where are the tadpoles? 

There is much less water there than a month ago. Where, then, do the Rana palustris lay their spawn? I think in the river, because it is there I hear them, but I cannot see any. Perhaps they choose pretty deep water, now it is so warm. 

Now and for a week I have noticed a few pads with wrinkled edges blown up by the wind. 

Already the coarse grass along the meadow shore, or where it is wettest, is a luxuriant green, answering in its deep, dark color to the thunder-cloud, – both summer phenomena, – as if it too had some lightning in its bosom. 

Some early brakes at the Island woods are a foot high and already spread three or four inches. 

The Polygonatum pubescens is strongly budded. 

The Salix lucida above Assabet Spring will not open for several days. 

The early form of the cinquefoil is now apparently in prime and very pretty, spotting the banks with its clear bright yellow. 

See apparently young toad tadpoles now, -- judging from their blackness, -- now quite free from the eggs or spawn. If I remember rightly, the toad is colored and spotted more like a frog at this season when it is found in the water. 

Observed an Emys insculpta, as often before, with the rear edge on one side of its shell broken off for a couple of inches, as if nibbled by some animal. Do not foxes or musquash do this? In this case the under jaw was quite nervy. 

Found a large water adder by the edge of Farmer’s large mud-hole, which abounds with tadpoles and frogs, on which probably it was feeding. It was sunning on the bank and would face me and dart its head toward me when I tried to drive it from the water. It is barred above, but indistinctly when out of water, so that it then appears almost uniformly dark-brown, but in the water broad reddish-brown bars are seen, very distinctly alternating with very dark brown ones. 

The head was very flat and suddenly broader than the neck behind. Beneath it was whitish and red dish flesh-color.  It was about two inches in diameter at the thickest part. They are the biggest and most formidable-looking snakes that we have. The inside of its mouth and throat was pink. It was awful to see it wind along the bottom of the ditch at last, raising wreaths of mud, amid the tadpoles, to which it must be a very sea-serpent. 

I afterward saw another running under Sam Barrett’s grist-mill the same after noon. He said that he saw a water snake, which he distinguished from a black snake, in an apple tree near by, last year, with a young robin in its mouth, having taken it from the nest. There was a cleft or fork in the tree which enabled it to ascend. 

Find the Viola Muhlenbergii abundantly out (how long?), in the meadow southwest of Farmer's Spring. 

The cinnamon and interrupted ferns are both about two feet high in some places. The first is more uniformly woolly down the stem, the other, though very woolly at top, being partly bare on the stem. The wool of the last is coarser. 

George, the carpenter, says that he used to see a great many stone-heaps in the Saco in Bartlett, near the White Mountains, like those in the Assabet, and that there were no lampreys there and they called them “snake-heaps.” 

Saw some unusually broad chestnut planks, just sawed, at the mill. Barrett said that they came from Lincoln; whereupon I said that I guessed I knew where they came from, judging by their size alone, and it turned out that I was right. I had often gathered the nuts of those very trees and had observed within a year that they were cut down. 

So it appears that we have come to this, that if I see any peculiarly large chestnuts at the sawmill, I can guess where they came from, even know them in the log. These planks were quite shaky, and the heart had fallen out of one. Barrett said that it was apt to be the case with large chestnut. 

They use this wood for coffins, instead of black walnut.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 12, 1858

George, the carpenter, says that he used to see a great many stone-heaps in the Saco and that there were no lampreys there and they called them “snake-heaps.” See May 8, 1858 ("Mr. Wright , an old fisherman, thinks the stone-heaps are not made by lamprey. May 4, 1858 ("I asked [a fisherman] if he knew what fish made the stone-heaps in the river. He said the lamprey eel.”)

Find the Viola Muhlenbergii abundantly out (how long?), in the meadow southwest of Farmer's Spring. See May 22, 1856 ("Viola Muhlenbergii is abundantly out; how long?"); May 16, 1857 ("Viola Muhlenbergii abundantly out, how long?”)