The lower limbs of the spruce slanted downward more generally than those of the fir.

July 11. 

Sunday. Mizzling weather. 

Were visited by three men from Glen House, who thought it was well named “ Tucker’s Ravine,” because it tuckered a man out to get to it! 

It rained hard all Sunday night, wetting us but little, however. One of the slender spruce trees by our camp, which we cut down, though it looked young and thrifty, being twenty-eight feet high and only six and a half inches in diameter, had about eighty rings, and the firs were at least as old. 

Wentworth said that he had five hundred acres, and would sell the whole with buildings for $2000. 

He knew a dead log on the fire to be spruce, and not fir, because the stubs of the lower part slanted downward, and also by its “straight rift.” He called a rotten cane “dozy.” After some observation I concluded that it was true that the base of the lower limbs of the spruce slanted downward more generally than those of the fir.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 11, 1858

July 11. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, July 11

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