Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/164

154 with an incessant twitter. Even the crickets seem to join the concert. Yet I think it is not the same every morning, though it may be fair. An hour or two later there is comparative silence. The awaking of the birds, a tumultuous twittering.

At sunrise a slight mist curls along the surface of the water. When the sun falls on this, it looks like a red dust.

As seen from the top of the hill, the sun just above the horizon, red and shorn of beams, is somewhat pear-shaped, owing to some irregularity in the refraction of the lower strata of the air, produced, as it were, by the dragging of the lower part, and then it becomes a broad ellipse, the lower half a dun red, owing to the greater grossness of the air there.

The distant river is like molten silver at this hour. It reflects merely the light, not the blue. What shall I name that small cloud that at tends the sun s rising, that hangs over the portals of the day, like an embroidered banner, and heralds his coming, though sometimes it proves a portcullis which falls and cuts off the new day in its birth.

Found four tortoises nests on the high bank just robbed, and the eggs devoured, one not emptied of its yolk. Others had been robbed some days. Apparently about three eggs to