Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/173

Rh woods, the red-eye, veery, chewink, oven-bird, wood-thrush.

The cistus is well open now, with its broad cup-like flower, one of the most delicate yellow flowers, with large spring-yellow petals, and its stamens laid one way. It is hard to get home fresh; caducous and inclined to droop. The yellow Bethlehem-star is of a deeper yellow than the cistus, a very neat flower, grass-like.

On the river, by Hubbard's Meadow. Looking at a clump of trees and bushes on the meadow, which is commonly flooded in the spring, I saw a middling-sized rock concealed by the leaves, lying in the midst, and perceived that this had obtained a place, had made good the locality for the maples and shrubs which had found a foothold about it. Here the weeds and tender plants were detained and protected. The bowlder dropped once on a meadow makes at length a clump of trees there, and is concealed by the beneficiaries it had protected.

June 17, 1853. The pogonias, adder s tongue arethusas I see now-a-days, are getting to be numerous; they are far too pale to compete with the Arethusa bulbosa, and then their snake-like odor is much against them.

There have been three ultra reformers, lecturers on slavery, temperance, the church, etc., in and about our house and Mrs. B's, the last