There are two kinds of white oak

March 6.

3 P. M. - To Harrington's.

Old Mr. Joe Hosmer chopping wood at his door. He is full of meat.

Had a crack with him.

I told him I was studying lichens, pointing to his wood.

He thought I meant the wood itself.

Well, he supposed he'd had more to do with wood than I had.

“Now," said he, “there are two kinds of white oak. Most people wouldn't notice it. When I've been chopping, say along in March, after the sap begins to start, I'll sometimes come to an oak that will color my axe steel-blue like a sword blade. Well, that oak is fine-grained and heavier than the common, and I call it blue white oak, for no other blues my axe so.

Then there are two kinds of black oak, or yellow-bark. One is the mean black oak, or bastard. Then there's a kind of red oak smells like urine - three or four days old.” 

It was really respectable in him that he avoided using the vulgar name of this oak. In an old man like him it was a true delicacy.

Of this red oak he told me a story.

There was old Mr. Joe Derby. He came after houses were built. He settled near the present Derby place.

Well, his manteltree was very large, of red oak hewn square, — they used wood in those days, and in course of time it had be come charred with heat, and you could break coals off it.

He could remember the house; it was more than a hundred years old.

Well, when they pulled it down, old Mr. Derby told him that he split it up and put

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been the track of an otter near the Clamshell Hill, for it looks too large for a mink, — nearly an inch and a half in diameter and nearly round.

Occasionally it looked as if a rail had been drawn along through the thin snow over the ice, with faint footprints at long intervals.

I saw where he came out of a hole in the ice, and tracked him forty rods, to where he went into an other. Saw where he appeared to have been sliding.

Found three or four parmelias caperata) in fruit on a white oak on the high river-bank between Tarbell's and Harrington's.

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I remember a few words that I had with a young Englishman in the citadel, who politely undertook to do the honors of Quebec to me, whose clear, glowing English complexion I can still see. Perhaps he was a chaplain in the army.

In answer to his information, I looked round with a half-suppressed smile at those preparations for war, Quebec all primed and cocked for it, and at length expressed some of my surprise.

“Perhaps you hold the opinions of the Quakers,” he replied.

I thought, if there was any difference between us, it might be that I was born in modern times.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 6, 1852

I told him I was studying lichens. Found three or four parmelias caperata) in fruit on a white oak on the high river-bank between Tarbell's and Harrington's. See February 6, 1852 ("Near the C. Miles house there are some remarkably yellow lichens (parmelias?) on the rails, -- ever as if the sun were about to shine forth clearly"); March 1, 1852 ("There is a certain advantage in these hard and precise terms, such as the lichenist uses."); March 5, 1852 ("I find myself inspecting little granules , as it were , on the bark of trees , little shields or apothecia spring ing from a thallus , such is the mood of my mind , and I call it studying lichens. "); March 7, 1852 ("The student of lichens has his objects of study brought to his study on his fuel without any extra expense ."). See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Lichens and the lichenst