Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/348

338 Mill Dam&quot; [i. e., in the village]. He has not even planned an essentially better life.

Sometimes the swampy vigor in large doses proves rank poison to the sensitively bred man, as where dogwood grows. How far he has departed from the rude vigor of Nature, that he cannot assimilate and transmute her elements. The morning air may make a debauchee sick. No herb is friendly to him. All at last are poisons, and yet none are medicines to him, and so he dies; the air kills him.

I heard a solitary duck on Goose Pond making a doleful cry, though its ordinary one, just before sundown, as if caught in a trap or by a fox, and creeping silently through the bushes, I saw it, probably a wood duck, sailing rapidly away. But it still repeated its cry as if calling for a mate. When the hen hatches ducks, they do not mind her clucking. They lead the hen.—Chickens and ducks are well set on the earth. What great legs they have! This part is early developed. A perfect Antæus is a young duck in this respect, deriving a steady stream of health and strength from the earth, for he rarely gets off it, ready either for land or water. Nature is not on her last legs yet. A chick's stout legs! If they were a little larger, they would injure the globe's tender organization with their scratching. Then, for digestion, consider their crops