Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts.djvu/64

 among the reeds, and see the spring come in.

But sometimes man's blood seems to circulate faster than the currents of the universe, and he has his morning while she has her noon. Eternity is merely living, and the tune unchangeable.

One wonders if setting hens are troubled with ennui, those long March days sitting on and on, in the crevice of a hay-loft, in this inactive employment.

At length we threw our rinds into the water for the fishes to nibble, and added a breath to the life of living men. Our melons lay at home on the sandy bottom of the Merrimac; and our potatoes in the sun and water, in the bottom of the boat, looked like a fruit of the country. Again we rowed steadily upward, Saxon-wise, as it were, against the current of Nature, again from time to time scaring up a kingfisher or a summer duck,—the former flying rather by vigorous impulses than by steady and patient steering with this short rudder of his,—sounding his rattle along the fluvial street. [16]