Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/176

166 it came out of. There was no callowness as in the young of most birds. It seemed a singular place for a bird to begin its life, this little pinch of down, and lie still on the exact spot where the egg lay, a flat exposed shelf on the side of a bare hill, with nothing but the whole heavens, the broad universe above, to brood it when its mother was away.

The huckleberry apple is sometimes a red shoot, with tender and thick red leaves and branchlets, in all three inches long. It is, as it were, a monstrous precocity, and what should have waited to become fruit is a merely bloated or puffed up flower, a child with a great dropsical head, and prematurely bright, in a huckleberry apple. The really sweet and palateable huckleberry is not matured before July, and runs the risk of drying up in drouth, and never attaining its proper size.

There are some fine large clusters of lambkill close to the shore of Walden, under the Peak, fronting the south. They are early, too, and large, apparently, both on account of the warmth and the vicinity of the water. These flowers are in perfect cylinders, sometimes six inches long by two wide, and three such raying out or upward from one centre, that is, three branches clustered together. Examined close by, I think this handsomer than the mountain laurel. The