Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/376

366 finally bathed in earnest from the opposite side. The heat tempted us to prolong this luxury. I made quite an excursion up and down the river in the water, a fluvial walk. It seemed the properest highway for this weather, now in water a foot or two deep, now suddenly descending through valleys up to my neck, but all alike agreeable. Sometimes the bottom looked as if covered with large, flat, sharp-edged rocks. I could break off cakes three or four inches thick, and a foot or two square. It was a conglomeration of sand and pebbles, as it were cemented with oxide of iron (?), quite red with it, iron colored to the depth of an inch on the upper-side, a hard kind of pan covering or forming the bottom in many places. There are many interesting objects of study, as you walk up and down a clear river like this in the water, where you can see every inequality in the bottom, and every object on it. The breams' nests are interesting and even handsome, and the shallow water in them over the sand is so warm to my hand that I think their ova will soon be hatched; also, the numerous heaps of stones, made I know not certainly by what fish, many of them rising above the surface. There are weeds on the bottom which remind you of the sea; the radical leaves of the floating heart which I have never seen mentioned, very large,