Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/92

82 that I have heard. White-weed now whitens the fields. There are many star flowers. I remember the anemone especially. The rue anemone is not yet all gone, lasting longer than the true one; above all, the trientalis, and of late the yellow Bethlehem star, and perhaps others.

I have come with a spy-glass to look at the hawks. They have detected me, and are already screaming over my head more than half a mile from the nest. I find no difficulty in looking at the young hawk (there appears to be one only standing on the edge of the nest); resting the glass in the crotch of a young oak, I can see every wink and the color of its iris. It watches me more steadily than I it, now looking straight clown at me with both eyes and outstretched neck, now turning its head and looking with one eye. How its eye and its whole head express anger. Its anger is more in its eye than in its beak. It is quite hoary over the eye and under the chin. The mother meanwhile is incessantly circling about, and above its charge and me, farther or nearer, sometimes withdrawing a quarter of a mile, but occasionally coming to alight for a moment, almost within gun-shot, on the top of a tall white pine; but I hardly bring my glass fairly to bear on her, and get sight of her angry eye through the pine needles, before she circles away again. Thus for an hour that I lay there, screaming