The flowers I see at present are autumn flowers..

August 28. 

P. M. — To Walden.

A cool day; wind northwest. Need a half -thick coat. Thus gradually we withdraw into winter quarters. It is a clear, flashing air, and the shorn fields now look bright and yellowish and cool, tinkled and twittered over by bobolinks, goldfinches, sparrows, etc. 

You feel the less inclined to bathing this weather, and bathe from principle, when boys, who bathe for fun, omit it. 

Thick fogs these mornings. We have had little or no dog-days this year, it has been so dry.

Pumpkins begin to be yellow. 

White cornel berries mostly fallen. 

The arrowhead is still a common flower and an important one. I see some very handsome ones in Cardinal Ditch, whose corollas are an inch and a half in diameter. The greater part, however, have gone to seed. 

The flowers I see at present are autumn flowers, such as have risen above the stubble in shorn fields since it was cut, whose tops have commonly been clipped by the scythe or the cow; or the late flowers, as asters and goldenrods, which grow in neglected fields and along ditches and hedgerows. 

The rhexia in Ebby Hubbard's field is considerably past prime, and it is its reddish chalices which show most at a distance now. I should have looked ten days ago. Still it is handsome with its large yellow anthers against clear purple petals. It grows there in large patches with hardhack. 

I hear that some of the villagers were aroused from their sleep before light by the groans or bellowings of a bullock which an unskillful butcher was slaughtering at the slaughter-house. What morning or Memnonian music was that to ring through the quiet village ? What did that clarion sing of? What a comment on our village life! Song of the dying bullock! But no doubt those who heard it inquired, as usual, of the butcher the next day, "What have you got to-day?" "Sirloin, good beefsteak, rattleran," etc. 

I saw a month or more ago where pine-needles which had fallen (old ones) stood erect on low leaves of the forest floor, having stuck in, or passed through, them. They stuck up as a fork which falls from the table. Yet you would not think that they fell with sufficient force. 

The fruit of the sweet-gale is yellowing.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 28, 1859


Thick fogs these mornings. See July 22, 1851 ("The season of morning fogs has arrived. A great crescent over the course of the river, the fog retreats, and I do not see how it is dissipated, leaving this slight, thin vapor to curl over the surface of the still, dark water, still as glass. These are our fairest days, which are born in a fog."); August 7, 1860 ("If we awake into a fog it does not occur to us that the inhabitants of a neighboring town may have none)

White cornel berries mostly fallen. See August 28, 1856 ("The panicled cornel berries are whitening, but already mostly fallen."); August 28, 1852 ("The berries of the alternate leaved cornel have dropped off mostly.")

The rhexia in Ebby Hubbard's field is considerably past prime, and it is its reddish chalices which show most at a distance now.Still it is handsome with its large yellow anthers against clear purple petals. See.August 27, 1856 (“The rhexia greets me in bright patches on meadow banks.”); October 2, 1856 (“The scarlet leaves and stem of the rhexia, some time out of flower, makes almost as bright a patch in the meadow now as the flowers did,”)