Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/79

Rh resting on the mud, and took out some. Feeling again in the first hole, I found as much more there. Though I had been stepping round and over the second nest for several minutes, I had not scared the pout. The ova of the first nest already contained white wiggling young. I saw no motion in the others. The ova in each case were dull yellowish, and the size of small buckshot. These nests did not communicate with each other, and had no other outlet.

Pouts then make their nests in shallow mud-holes or bays in masses of weedy mud, or probably in the muddy bank, and the old pout hovers over the spawn or keeps guard at the entrance. Where do the Walden pouts breed when they have not access to the meadow? The first pout, whose eggs were most developed, was the largest, and had some slight wounds on the back. The other may have been the male, in the act of fertilizing the ova.

I sit in my boat in the twilight, by the edge of the river. Bull-frogs now are in full blast. I do not hear other frogs. Their notes are probably drowned. Some of these great males are yellow, or quite yellowish over the whole back. Are not the females oftenest white-throated? What lungs, what health, what terrenity (if not serenity) their note suggests! At length I hear the faint stertoration of a Rana palustris (if not halecina?)