There is quite a drought.

August 21.

Sunday. P. M. — Walk over the Great Meadows and observe how dry they are. 

There is quite a drought, and I can walk almost anywhere over these meadows without wetting my feet. It is much drier than it was three weeks ago there. It is like the summer of '54. 

Almost all the grass has been cut and carried off. It is quite dry crossing the neck of the Holt. 

In many holes in the meadow, made by the ice, the water having dried up, I see many small fishes — pouts and pickerel and bream — left dead and dying. In one place there were fifty or one hundred pouts from four to five inches long with a few breams, all dead and dry. It is remarkable that these fishes have not all been devoured by birds or quadrupeds. 

The blue herons must find it easy to get their living now. Are they not more common on our river such years as this?

In holes where the water has just evaporated, leaving the mud moist, I see a hundred little holes near together, with occasionally an indistinct track of a bird between. Measuring these holes, I find them to be some two inches deep, or about the length of a snipe's bill, and doubtless they were made by them. I start one snipe. 

People now (at this low stage of water) dig mud for their compost-heaps, deepen wells, build bank walls, perchance, along the river, and in some places make bathing-places by raking away the weeds. Many are ditching.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 21, 1859

There is quite a drought, and I can walk almost anywhere over these meadows without wetting my feet. It is much drier than it was three weeks ago there. It is like the summer of '54.. See August 19, 1854 ("There is now a remarkable drought, some of whose phenomena I have referred to during several weeks past.”); August 22, 1854 ("I go again to the Great Meadows, to improve this remarkably dry season and walk where in ordinary times I cannot go.")

The blue herons must find it easy to get their living now. See August 22, 1854 ("Thus the drought serves the herons, etc., confining their prey within narrower limits, and doubtless they are well acquainted with suitable retired pools far in the marshes to go a-fishing in.")

In holes where the water has just evaporated, leaving the mud moist, I see a hundred little holes near together, with occasionally an indistinct track of a bird between. . . .I start one snipe.  See August 3, 1859 (". To-day I can walk dry over the greater part of the meadows, . . . many think it has not been so dry for ten years! Goodwin is there after snipes. I scare up one in the wettest part.")

People now (at this low stage of water) dig mud for their compost-heaps. See August 28, 1854 ("The farmers improve this dry spell to cut ditches and dig mud in the meadows and pond-holes. I see their black heaps in many places. ")