Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/120

110 and ornaments it much. Ever it will be some obscure, small, and modest flower that will most please us.

How difficult, if not impossible, to do the things we have done, as fishing and camping out. They seem to me a little fabulous now. Boys are bathing at Hubbard's Bend, playing with a boat, I at the willows. The color of their bodies in the sun at a distance is pleasing, the not often seen flesh color. I hear the sound of their sport borne over the water. As yet we have not man in Nature. What a singular fact for an angel visitant to this earth to carry back in his notebook, that men were forbidden to expose their bodies under the severest penalties! A pale pink which the sun would soon tan. White man! There are no white men to contrast with the red and the black. They are of such colors as the weaver gives them. I wonder that the dog knows his master when he goes in to bathe, and does not stay by his clothes.

Small white-bellied (?) swallows in a row (a dozen) on the telegraph wire over the water by the bridge. This perch is little enough departure from unobstructed air to suit them. Pluming themselves. If you could furnish a perch aerial enough, even birds of paradise would alight. They do not alight on trees, methinks, unless on dead and bare boughs, but stretch a