The hearth-side is getting to be a more comfortable place than out-of-doors.

October 21. 

First ice that I’ve seen or heard of, a tenth of an inch thick in yard, and the ground is slightly frozen. 

I see many myrtle-birds now about the house this forenoon, on the advent of cooler weather. They keep flying up against the house and the window and fluttering there, as if they would come in, or alight on the wood-pile or pump. They would commonly be mis taken for sparrows, but show more white when they fly, beside the yellow on the rump and sides of breast seen near to and two white bars on the wings. Chubby birds.

P. M. — Up Assabet 
     
Cool and windy. Those who have put it off thus long make haste now to collect what apples were left out and dig their potatoes before the ground shall freeze hard. Now again, as in the spring, we begin to look for sheltered and sunny places where we may sit. 

I see, hanging over an alder bough above the hemlocks, five inches above the water, a great eel, over two feet long and two inches wide or thick horizontally (more vertically) in the forward part of its body. It must weigh two and a half pounds; the biggest I ever saw. What a repulsive and gluttonous-looking creature, with its vomer made to plow the mud and wallow in filth, and its slimy skin (I had forgotten it was scaly, it is so fine). It was somewhat bloated, perhaps, and its skin distended, but at any rate it had got its skin full. It is more repulsive to me than a snake, and I think must be less edible. Its dead-white eye-spots — for the eyes were closed flat on its black and shiny vomer — and the fringed gelatinous kind of alga or what-not that covered like a lichen the parts submerged made it yet more repulsive. 

I cannot go by a large dead swamp white oak log this cool evening, but with no little exertion get it aboard, and some blackened swamp white oak stumps, whose earthy parts are all gone. 

I see a robin eating prinos berries. Is not the robin the principal berry-eating bird nowadays? There must be more about the barberry bushes in Melvin’s Preserve than anywhere. 

October 21, 2017

As I am paddling home swiftly before the northwest wind, absorbed in my wooding, I see, this cool and grayish evening, that peculiar yellow light in the east, from the sun at little before its setting. It has just come out beneath a great cold slate-colored cloud that occupies most of the western sky, as smaller ones the eastern, and now its rays, slanting over the hill in whose shadow I float, fall on the eastern trees and hills with a thin, yellow light like a clear yellow wine, but somehow it reminds me that now the hearth-side is getting to be a more comfortable place than out-of-doors. Before I get home the sun has set and a cold white light in the west succeeded. 

I saw wood tortoises coupled, up the Assabet, the back of the upper above water. It held the lower with its claws about the head, and they were not to be parted. 

It is pitiful to see a man of sixty, a philosopher, per chance, inquiring for a bearing apple orchard for sale. If he must have one, why did he not set it out when he was thirty? How mean and lazy, to be plucking the fruit of another man’s labor. The old man I saw yesterday lives on peaches and milk in their season, but then he planted them. 

Is not the poet bound to write his own biography? Is there any other work for him but a good journal? We do not wish to know how his imaginary hero, but how he, the actual hero, lived from day to day.

That big swamp white oak limb or tree which I found prostrate in the swamp was longer than my boat and tipped it well. One whole side, the upper, was covered with green hypnum, and the other was partly white with fungi. That green coat adhered when I split it. Immortal wood! that had begun to live again. 

Others burn unfortunate trees that lose their lives prematurely. 

These old stumps stand like anchorites and yogees, putting off their earthy garments, more and more sublimed from year to year, ready to be translated, and then they are ripe for my fire. I administer the last sacrament and purification. I find old pitch pine sticks which have lain in the mud at the bottom of the river, nobody knows how long, and weigh them up, — almost as heavy as lead, – float them home, saw and split them. Their pitch, still fat and yellow, has saved them for me, and they burn like candles at last. 

I become a connoisseur in wood at last, take only the best.

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, October 21, 1857

That peculiar yellow light in the east, from the sun at little before its setting. See October 28, 1852 (“Suddenly the light of the setting sun yellows and warms all the landscape.”); October 28, 1857 ("All at once a low-slanted glade of sunlight from one of heaven’s west windows behind me.") See also note to  November 22, 1851 ("The light of the setting sun, just emerged from a cloud and suddenly falling on and lighting up the needles of the white pine . . . After a cold gray day this cheering light almost warms us by its resemblance to fire.")

I see many myrtle-birds now about the house this forenoon, on the advent of cooler weather. They keep flying up against the house and the window. See October 10, 1859 ("White-throated sparrows in yard and close up to house, together with myrtle-birds (which fly up against side of house and alight on window-sills)"); October 14, 1855 (“One flies up against the house and alights on the window-sill within a foot of me inside. Black bill and feet, yellow rump, brown above, yellowish-brown on head, cream-colored chin, two white bars on wings, tail black edged with white, — the yellow-rump warbler or myrtle-bird without doubt”); October 19, 1856 (“See quite a flock of myrtle-birds, — which I might carelessly have mistaken for slate-colored snowbirds.) and note to  October 28, 1853 ("Little sparrow-sized birds flitting about amid the dry corn stalks and the weeds, — one, quite slaty with black streaks and a bright-yellow crown and rump, which I think is the yellow-crowned warbler,") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Myrtle-bird

Now again, as in the spring, we begin to look for sheltered and sunny places where we may sit. See  October 21, 1857 ("somehow it reminds me that now the hearth-side is getting to be a more comfortable place than out-of-doors"); See also October 26, 1852 ("At this season we seek warm sunny lees and hillsides . . .where we cuddle and warm ourselves in the sun as by a fire, where we may get some of its reflected as well as direct heat."); April 26, 1857 (In the winter we sit by fires in the house; in spring and fall, in sunny and sheltered nooks; in the summer, in shady and cool groves, or over water where the breeze circulates.”)

Before I get home the sun has set and a cold white light in the west succeeded. See October 25, 1858 (“Call these November Lights. Hers is a cool, silvery ligh); October 27, 1858 (“The cool, white twilights of that season which is itself the twilight of the year.”);  November 10, 1858 ("The warmer colors are now rare. A cool and silvery light is the prevailing one; dark-blue or slate-colored clouds in the west, and the sun going down in them"); November 14, 1853 ("the clear, white, leafless twilight of November”)

I saw wood tortoises coupled .See June 19, 1855 (“Wood tortoises united, with heads out of water.”)

Is not the poet bound to write his own biography? . . . how he, the actual hero, lived from day to day. See December 26, 1855 (“In a true history or biography, of how little consequence those events of which so much is commonly made! . . . I find in my Journal that the most important events in my life, if recorded at all, are not dated.”); October 27, 1857 ("The real facts of a poet's life would be of more value to us than any work of his art.")

October 21.  See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, October 21

Before I get home

the sun has set with a cold

white light in the west.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The hearth-side is getting to be a more comfortable place than out-of-doors

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 © 2009-2024

tinyurl.com/HDT571021

The miller now raises his gate and lets his pond run off.

May 7. 

Wednesday. Fresh easterly wind. 

2 P. M. — To bear-berry on Major Heywood road. 

In Deacon Hosmer’s barn meadows, hear the don’t don’t of a bullfrog. 

In the first hollow in the bank this side of Clamshell, where sand has been dug for the meadow, are a hundred or more bank swallows at 2 P. M. (I suspect I have seen them for some time) engaged in prospecting and digging their holes and circling about. It is a snug place for them,—though the upright portion of the bank is only four or five feet high, — a semi-circular recess facing the southeast. Some are within scratching out the sand, -- I see it cast out of the holes behind them, -- others hanging on to the entrance of the holes, others on the flat sandy space beneath in front, and others circling about, a dozen rods over the meadow. 

Theirs is a low, dry, grating twitter, or rather rattle, less metallic or musical than the vite vite and twittering notes of barn and white-bellied swallows. 

They are white-bellied, dark winged and tailed, with a crescent of white nearly around the lower part of the neck, and mouse-colored heads and backs. The upper and greater part of this bank is a coarse sliding gravel, and they build only in the perpendicular and sandy part (I sit and watch them within three or four rods) and close to the upper part of it. 

While I am looking, they all suddenly with one consent take to wing, and circle over the hillside and meadow, as if they chose to work at making their holes a little while at a time only. I find the holes on an average about a foot deep only as yet, some but a few inches. 

In the meanwhile I hear, through this fresh, raw east wind, the te-a-lea of myrtle-birds from the woods across the-river. I hear the evergreen-forest note close by; and hear and see many myrtle-birds, at the same time that I hear what I have called the black and white creeper’s note. Have I ever confounded them? 

Over the edge of Miles’s mill-pond, now running off, a bumblebee goes humming over the dry brush. I think I saw one on the 5th also. 

Miles began last night to let the water run off. The pond falls about three inches in twenty-four hours. The brook below is full of fishes, -—suckers, pouts, eels, trouts, -— endeavoring to get up, but his dam prevents. 

This morning his young man killed a number of pouts and eels and suckers with a shovel. Here he comes now, at 4 P. M., with a spear, and raises the gate and waits a few moments for the water, which was two or three feet deep just below the mill, to run off; and then I see a good-sized trout, four or five pouts, and several suckers, and one eel still making their way upward, though the water hardly covers their backs. They do not turn and go down the stream with the water which is thus suddenly and rapidly let off. 

Meanwhile this young man picks out half a dozen pouts, eels, and suckers with his spear. Twenty rods down the brook I saw many more suckers trying to make their way up. They found it difficult now to get over the bars where the water was very shallow, and were some times confined to the hollows between. I saw two or three in company trying to squeeze through a narrow passage under some alder boughs, which was blocked up by two spotted tortoises; and one large eel squirming directly over an indifferent wood turtle, concluding seemed unwilling to turn and go down the brook, and for the most part would come so near in the shallow water that they could easily be struck with the spear. 

The water thus suddenly let off, there were many spotted and wood tortoises seen crawling about on the bottom. 

One little snapping (making the fifth of its species here), three and a half inches long, going down a few rods below the dam. This, like the larger ones, going down the brook. Where to? and why? He can not be old enough to breed yet, and it is too early to be laying at the desert. 

This young snapping turtle was very strong-scented. Its tail appeared particularly long, as long as its shell, and very tapering, and very distinctly and sharply keeled. The first half-dozen of its dorsal serrations were very prominent and sharp, and its bill was very sharp also. It had four sharp points on each side of its shell behind, and I noticed that it swam better than other kinds of tortoises. Its head was as large as that of an ordinary wood tortoise. There were tracks of other turtles on the sandy bank.

The young man said that the eels came along as many as three in an hour in the night, and this morning there were a great many of them about the wheel. Last fall (this dam being made late in the fall), they found in the hollow under the wheel which they bailed out sixteen trout which weighed eight pounds.

It is surprising how many fishes will run up and breed in such a little brook as this. The fishes generally would conceal themselves in the mud under a projecting bank, or in some deep hole in the sand in mid-channel which communicated with the mud beneath. One of those larger snapping turtles seized the one I had by the head and they braced and struggled awhile. 

The miller now raises his gate and lets his pond run off. Do they not generally earlier? 

For a week the road has been full of cattle going up country.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 7, 1856

This dam being made late in the fall. . . . See  April 28, 1856 ("I began to survey the meadow there early, before Miles’s new mill had been running long this Monday morning and flooded it, but a great stream of water was already rushing down the brook, and it almost rose over our boots in the meadow before we had done.”); April 25, 1856 ("Warren Miles had caught three more snapping turtles since yesterday, at his mill, . . . These turtles have been disturbed or revealed by his operations.”); April 24 1856 (Warren Miles at his new mill tells me eels can’t get above his mill now, in the spring.”); February 28, 1856 ("Miles is repairing the damage done at his new mill by the dam giving way.”)

I hear the evergreen-forest note close by; and hear and see many myrtle-birds, at the same time that I hear what I have called the black and white creeper’s note. Have I ever confounded them? See May 6, 1855 ("The er er twe, ter ter twe, evergreen-forest note."); May 11, 1854 ("Hear the evergreen-forest note"); May 15, 1858 ("Hear the evergreen-forest note");  June 1, 1854 ("Hear my evergreen-forest note, sounding rather raspingly as usual, where there are large oaks and pines mingled. It is very difficult to discover now that the leaves are grown, as it frequents the tops of the trees. But I get a glimpse of its black throat and, I think, yellow head "); July 10 1854 ("Evergreen-forest note, I think, still.") and May 30, 1855 ("In the thick of the wood between railroad and Turnpike, hear the evergreen forest note, and see probably the bird,-- black throat, greenish-yellow or yellowish-green head and back, light-slate (?) wings with two white bars. Is it not the black-throated green warbler?”).

For a week the road has been full of cattle going up country. See May 6, 1855 ("Road full of cattle going up country.”);  May 8, 1854 ("I hear the voices of farmers driving their cows past to their up-country pastures now."); May 10, 1852 ("This Monday the streets are full of cattle being driven up-country, — cows and calves and colts.")