Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/188

178 springy, and up the river beyond, a battalion of fog rising white in the moonlight in ghost-like wisps, or like a flock of scared covenanters in a recess amid the hills.

It is worth while to walk thus in the night after a warm or sultry day, to enjoy the fresh, up-country, brake-like, spring-like scent in low grounds. At night the surface of the earth is a cellar, a refrigerator, no doubt wholesomer than those made with ice by day. Got home at 11.

June 18, 1854. To Climbing Fern. The meadows, like this Nut Meadow, are now full of the latter grasses just beginning to flower, and the graceful columns of the rue (thalictrum) not yet generally in flower, and the large tree or shrub-like Archangelica with its great umbels now fairly in bloom along the edge of the brook.

I discover that Dugan found the eggs of my snapping turtle of June 7th, apparently the same day. It is perhaps five or six rods from the brook, in the sand near its edge. The surface had been disturbed over a foot and a half in diameter, and was slightly concave. The nest commenced five inches beneath, and at its neck was two and a half inches across, and from this nearly four inches deep, and swelled out below to four inches in width, shaped like a short, rounded bottle with a broad mouth, and the