Page:Autumn. From the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/311

Rh those bare twigs across the pond are bread and cheese to me. So many oak leaves have fallen that the white birch stems are more distinct amid the young oaks. I see to the bone, see those bare birches prepared to stand the winter through on the hillsides. They never sing, What's this dull town to me? The maples skirting the meadows in dense phalanxes, look like light infantry advanced for a swamp fight. Ah, dear November, you must be sacred to the nine, surely. The willow catkins already peep out one fourth of an inch. Early crowfoot is reddened at Lee's.

Nov. 19, 1839.

Nov. 19 [?], 1857. I see where a mouse, which had a hole under a stump, has eaten out clean the inside of the little seeds of the Prinos verticillata berries. What pretty fruit for them, these bright berries! They run up the twigs in the night, and gather this shining fruit, take out the small seeds, and eat these kernels at the entrance to their burrows. The ground is strewn with them there.

Nov. 20, 1850. Desor, who has been among the Indians at Lake Superior this summer, told