Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/312

302 than that, and was more remarkable for its continuance and monotony than any other bird s note I ever heard. It evidently belongs only to cool mountain sides high up amid the fir and spruce. I saw ever flitting through the fir tops restlessly a small white and dark bird, sylvia-like, which may have been it. Sometimes they appeared to be attracted by our smoke. The note was so incessant that at length you only noticed when it ceased.

The black flies were of various sizes, much larger than I noticed in Maine. They compelled me most of the time to sit in the smoke, which I preferred to wearing a veil. They lie along your forehead in a line where your hat touches it, or behind your ears, or about your throat if not protected by a beard, or get into the rims of the eyes or between the fingers, and there suck till they are crushed. But fortunately they do not last far into the evening, and a wind or a fog disperses them. I did not mind them much, but I noticed that men working on the highway made a fire to keep them off. Anything but mosquitoes by night. I find many black flies accidentally pressed in my botany and plant books. A botanist s books, if he has ever visited the primitive northern woods, will be pretty sure to contain such specimens.

H found, near the edge of the ravine