Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/245

Rh in the size and distance of objects. A rock is it, or an elephant asleep? Are these trees on an upland or a lowland, or do they skirt a sea beach? When I get there, shall I look off on the sea?–The white weed is the only obvious flower. I see the tops of the rye wave, and grain fields are more interesting than by day. The water is dull-colored, hardly more light than a rye field.

You may not suspect that the milk of the cocoanut, which is imported from the other side of the world, is mixed. So pure do some truths come to us, I trust.

What a mean and wretched creature is man. By and by some Dr. Morton may be filling your cranium with white mustard-seed to learn its internal capacity. Of all ways invented to come at a knowledge of a living man, this seems to me the worst, as it is the most belated. You would learn more by once paring the nails of the living subject. There is nothing out of which the spirit has more completely departed, and in which it has left fewer significant traces.

June 25, 1853. To Assabet bathing-place. Found an unusual quantity of Amelanchier berries. I think of the two common kinds, one a taller bush twice as high as my head, with thinner and lighter colored leaves, and larger, or at least somewhat softer, fruit, the other, a