Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/101

Rh an independent air, and pausing from time to time to look about from under their flapping ears and snuff the air. The hogs I saw this afternoon, all busily rooting without holding up their heads to look at us, the whole field appearing as if it had been most miserably ploughed or scarified with a harrow, with their shed to retreat to in rainy weather, affected me as more human than other quadrupeds. They are comparatively clean about their lodgings.

June 10, 1856. To Dugan Desert.—I hear the huckleberry bird now add to its usual strain a-tea tea tea tea tea.

A painted tortoise laying her eggs ten feet from the wheel track on the Marlboro' road. She paused at first, but I sat down within two feet, and she soon resumed her work, had excavated a hollow about five inches wide and six long in the moistened sand, and cautiously, with long intervals, she continued her work, resting always her fore feet on the same spot, and never looking round, her eye shut all but a narrow slit. Whenever I moved, perhaps to brush off a mosquito, she paused. A wagon approached, rumbling afar off, and then there was a pause till it had passed, and long after, a tedious, naturlangsam pause of the slow-blooded creature, a sacrifice of time such as those animals are up to which slumber half a year and live for