Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/230

220 fills all the swamps, and when I look down, I see commonly the leaf of the gold-thread.

June 23, 1853. To White Pond. After bathing, I paddled to the middle in the leaky boat. The heart-leaf, which grows thinly here, is an interesting plant, sometimes floating at the end of a solitary, almost invisible, thread-like stem, more than six feet long, and again many purplish stems intertwined into loose ropes, or like large skeins of silk, abruptly spreading at top, of course, into a perfectly flat shield, a foot or more in diameter, of small heart-shaped leaves, which rise or fall on their stems as the water is higher or lower. This perfectly horizontal disposition of the leaves in a single plane is an interesting and peculiar feature in water plants of this kind. Leaves and flowers made to float on the dividing line between two elements.

In the warm noons now-a-days I see the spotted, small, yellow eyes of the four-leaved loose strife looking at me from under the birches and pines springing up in sandy, upland fields. The other day I saw what I took to be a scarecrow in a cultivated field, and noting how unnaturally it was stuffed out here and there, and how ungainly its arms and legs were, I thought to myself, &quot;Well, it is thus they make these things, they do not stand much about it,&quot; but