Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/63

Rh high, pods upright and nearly three inches long, linear and flat, leaves decidedly lanceolate or linear. Some minute, imperfect, unexpanded flowers, still on it, appear as if they would have been yellowish.

In the very open park in rear of the rocks on the hill-top, where lambkill and huckleberries and grass alternate, came to one of those handsome, round, mirror-like pools, a rod or two in diameter, and surrounded with a border of fine weeds, such as you frequently meet with on the top of springy hills. Though warm and muddy at bottom, they are very beautiful and glassy, and look as if they were cool springs, so high, exposed to the light, yet so wild and fertile; as if the fertility of the lowlands was transferred to the summit of the hills. They are the kind of mirrors at which the huntresses in the golden age arranged their toilets, which the deer frequented and contemplated their branching horns in.

June 6, 1854. I perceive the sweetness of the locust blossoms fifteen or twenty rods off, as I go down the street. To Assabet bathing place and return by Stone Bridge. The painted tortoises are now-a-days laying their eggs. I see where they have just been digging in the sand or gravel in a hundred places on the southerly sides of hills and banks near the river,