November 14.
Saw to-day, while surveying in the Second Division woods, a singular round mound in a valley, made perhaps sixty or seventy years ago.
Cyrus Stow thought it was a pigeon-bed, but I soon discovered the coal and that it was an old coal-pit. I once mistook one in the Maine woods for an Indian mound.
The indestructible charcoal told the tale.
I had noticed singular holes and trenches in the former wood, as if a fox had been dug out. The sun has probably been let in here many times, and this has been a cultivated field; and now it is clothed in a savage dress again.
The wild, rank, luxuriant place is where mosses and lichens abound.
We find no heroes' cairns except those of heroic colliers, who once sweated here begrimed and dingy, who lodged here, tending their fires, who lay on a beetle here, perchance, to keep awake.
Cyrus Stow thought it was a pigeon-bed, but I soon discovered the coal and that it was an old coal-pit. I once mistook one in the Maine woods for an Indian mound.
The indestructible charcoal told the tale.
I had noticed singular holes and trenches in the former wood, as if a fox had been dug out. The sun has probably been let in here many times, and this has been a cultivated field; and now it is clothed in a savage dress again.
The wild, rank, luxuriant place is where mosses and lichens abound.
We find no heroes' cairns except those of heroic colliers, who once sweated here begrimed and dingy, who lodged here, tending their fires, who lay on a beetle here, perchance, to keep awake.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 14, 1850
Colliers tending their fires who lay on a beetle here, perchance, to keep awake See March 15, 1857 ("Who was it, what satyr, that invented this rustic beetle? It was shaped:
An indispensable piece of woodcraft.")
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