Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/58

48 weather, as if the western horizon or the lower stratum of the air were filled with the hot dust of the day. The dust of his chariot eclipses his beams. I love to sit here and look off into the broad deep vale in which the shades of night are beginning to prevail. When the sun has set, the river becomes more white and distinct in the landscape I return by moonlight.

June 5, 1855. To Clam Shell by river I am much interested to see how Nature proceeds to heal the wounds where the turf was stripped off this meadow. There are large patches where nothing remained but pure black mud, nearly level, or with slight hollows like a plate in it. This the sun and air had cracked into irregular polygonal figures, a foot, more or less, in diameter. The whole surface of these patches is now covered with a short, soft, and pretty dense moss-like vegetation springing up and clothing it. The little hollows and the cracks are filled with a very dense growth of reddish grass or sedge, about an inch high, the growth in the cracks making pretty regular figures as in a carpet, while the intermediate spaces are very evenly, but much more thinly covered with minute sarothra and whitish Gnaphalium uliginosum. Thus the wound is at once scarred over. Apparently the seeds of that grass were heavier and were washed into the