Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts 2.djvu/115

 meadow lark, it sounds much louder, with a toodle-em note. It is the Sturnella neglecta of Audubon.&quot; Next he observes a young bird, &quot;a shrike (?) with a broad head, light-gray with black wings, a black tail, and side feathers and tips more or less white, singing a note unlovely and rasping."

Then he sees along the gravelly sides of prairie hollows a ground-plum, to which he assigns the specific name Astragalus, and finds it full grown and red on one side, June 12, the day before he leaves Mrs. Hamilton’s finally and returns to St. Paul. Parry says &quot;it is frequently used to allay the thirst of the traveller on the great western plains;&quot; but Thoreau did not make that use of it. In its immediate neighborhood he found &quot;a great many striped (?) snakes, especially about pools on the prairie.&quot; He had before noted a species of ground cherry, probably Physails viscosa, with its many nominal and variable species, and on June 14 he finds &quot;another species of Physalis with lanceolate and toothed leaves, bearing a large yellow flower, five-cornered, with five violet filamented stamens about one style; its corolla dark in the