Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/102

92 centuries. It was twenty minutes before I discovered that she was not making the hole, but filling it up slowly, having laid her eggs. She drew the moistened sand under herself, scraping it along from behind with both feet brought together. The claws turned inward. In the long pauses the ants troubled her, as the mosquitoes, me, by running over her eyes, which made her snap or dart out her head suddenly, striking the shell. She did not dance on the sand, nor finish covering the hollow quite so carefully as the one observed last year. She went off suddenly, and quickly at first, with a slow but sure instinct through the wood toward the swamp.

In a hollow apple tree, hole eighteen inches deep, young pigeon woodpeckers, large and well feathered. They utter their squeaking hiss whenever I cover the hole with my hand, apparently taking it for the approach of the mother.

June 10, 1857 A striped snake (so-called) was running about in a yard this forenoon, and in the afternoon it was found to have shed its slough, leaving it half way out of a hole which probably it used to confine it in. It was about in its new skin. Many creatures, devil's needles, etc., cast their sloughs now. Can't I?

F tells me to-day, that he has seen a