Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/257

Rh mountains north and south are at once a dark indigo blue, for they had been darkening an hour or more. Two small clouds are left on the horizon between Watatic and Monadnock, their sierra edges all on fire. Three minutes after the sun is gone, there is a bright and memorable afterglow in his path, and a brighter and more glorious light falls on the clouds above the portal. His car borne farther round brings us into the angle of excidence. Those little sierra clouds look like two castles on fire, and I see the fire through the windows. The low western horizon glows now, five or six minutes after sunset, with a delicate salmon color tinged with rose, deepest where the sun disappeared, and fading off upward. North and south are deep blue cloud islands in it. When I invert my head those delicate salmon-colored clouds look like a celestial Sahara, sloping gently upward, a plane inclined upward, to be traveled by caravans bound heavenward, with blue oases in it.

June 26, 1856. [New Bedford.] Rode to Sconticut Neck or Point, in Fair Haven, five or six miles. Heard of and sought out the hut of Martha Simons, the only pure-blooded Indian left about New Bedford. She lives alone on the narrowest part of the Neck, near the shore, in sight of New Bedford. Her hut stands some twenty-five rods from the road on a small tract