Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts 2.djvu/111

 openings, and also on the prairies. These prairies were found &quot;with hollows, often a pond in them, and covered with more weeds than grass; among them the lead plant (Solidago rigida, etc.). There was the wild rose, with the shad frogs hopping about and dropping their water all over it.&quot;

By the lake in a scarlet oak, eight feet up, I found a pigeon’s nest like the former one, but more stable, containing one young bird three inches long, of a dirty yellowish and leaden color, with pinfeathers, and with a great bill bare at the base and a blackish tip. Another young bird slipped to the ground, fluttering as if wounded, two or three times, as she went off amid the shrubs.

Of plants this day and the day before he notes the tall anemone (A. Virginiana), &quot;now a foot high, with flowers an inch and a half in diameter,—the white and obtuse-petalled variety; the golden aster (Chrysopsis), one specimen with many showy heads, the lower or radical leaves linear-lanceolate, with teeth at long intervals (now in flower); a