Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts 2.djvu/74

 rod by three feet,—and the new, two rods by four feet, eight or ten years old.

June 25. Rain in night and forenoon. I see Professor Wilson. 26. Walk up the river in the forenoon, and see a small, cut-leafed, five-petalled, spreading blue flower (Verbena bracteosa?) and the dragon-head mint. A species of Helianthus. At two we leave Red Wing in the War Eagle for Prairie du Chien, some two hundred miles distant. Mrs. Upham of Clinton with us; she has a cousin Clifton at Bedford, near Concord. The War Eagle draws two and one-half feet of water. Lake Pepin bore northeast, then east? by sun and compass. We reached Prairie du Chien, down the Mississippi, about nine in the morning of June 27. Thence by cars to Milwaukee.

In regard to Red Wing I was told that a hundred rattlesnakes a day could have been killed about Barn Bluff six or seven years ago; they were very thick on the hillsides then. There were three kinds in all, my informant said. Yet nobody had been killed that he knew of, though several were bitten. They were made sick for some time; a squaw,