Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/212

202 Smellie it is said that fishes take no care of their young. I think also that I see the young breams in schools hovering over their nests while the old ones are still protecting them.

Rambled up the grassy hollows in the sproutlands north (?) of Goose Pond. I felt a pleasing sense of strangeness and distance. Here in the midst of extensive sproutlands are numerous open hollows, more or less connected, where, for some reason, perhaps frosts, the wood does not spring up, and I was glad of it, filled with a fine, wiry grass, with the panicled andromeda, which loves dry places, now in blossom round the edges, and small black cherries and sand cherries struggling down into them. The woodchuck loves such places, and now wabbles off with a peculiar loud squeak like the sharp bark of a red squirrel, then stands erect at the entrance of his hole, ready to dive into it as soon as you approach. As wild and strange a place as you might find in the unexplored west or east. The quarter of a mile of sproutlands which separates it from the highway seems as complete a barrier as a thousand miles of earth. Your horizon is there all your own.

Again I am attracted by the deep scarlet of the wild moss rose, half open in the grass, all glowing with rosy light.

June 21, 1856. A very hot day, as was