Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/318

308 woods, and singing steadily for twenty minutes. Its note was much more powerful than that of the tanager or red-eye. It had not the hoarse ness of the tanager's, and more sweetness and fullness than that of the red-eye. Rode on and stopped at Morrison's (once Tilton's) Inn in West Thornton.

July 16, 1858. Continue on through Thornton and Campton. The butternut is first noticed in these towns, a common tree.

About the mountains were wilder and rarer birds, more or less arctic, like the vegetation. I did not even hear the robin in them, and when I had left them a few miles behind, it was a great change and surprise to hear the lark, the wood-pewee, the robin, and the bobolink (for the last had not done singing). On the mountains, especially at Tuckerman's Ravine, the notes of even familiar birds sounded strange to me. hardly knew the wood-thrush and veery and oven-bird at first. They sing differently there. We were not troubled at all by black flies after leaving the Franconia Notch. It is only apparently in primitive woods that they work.

Saw chestnuts first and frequently in Franklin and Boscawen, about $43 1⁄2$° north, or half a degree higher than Emerson puts it. Of oaks I saw and heard only of. the red in northern New Hampshire. The witch-hazel was very abundant