The Solanum Dulcamara berries are one other form which grows in drooping clusters. I do not know any clusters more graceful and stunning than these drooping cymes of scarlet or translucent, cherry-colored elliptical berries, with steel-blue or lead-coloured (?) purple pedicels (not peduncles) like the leaves on the ideas of the branches. They cling extra gracefully over the river’s brim than any pendant in a lady’s ear. For part of two days we traveled throughout heaps, loitering by the way, by way of primitive woods and swamps, over the very best peak of the Peterboro’ Hills to Monadnock, by methods from which all landlords and stage-drivers endeavored to dissuade us. But now that I look throughout the globe in an instant to that dim Monadnock peak, and these acquainted fields and copse-woods appear to occupy the higher part of the interval, I can’t understand that Joe Evely’s home still stands there at the base of the mountain, and that I made the lengthy tramp via the woods with invigorating scents earlier than I bought to it. Yet they’re thought of poisonous; not to look at, absolutely. They don’t seem to be only tumbling into the river all alongside shore, but into this sandy gully, to flee from which is a Sisyphus labor.
I fancy they’re attracted to some extent by this thin harvest of panic seed. The touch-me-not seed vessels go off like pistols, shoot their seeds off like bullets. No berries, I think, are so properly spaced and agreeably arranged in their drooping cymes, somewhat hexagonally, like a honeycomb. I can not understand that on the tops of these cool blue ridges are berries in abundance still, bluer than themselves, as if they borrowed their blueness from their locality. Would it not be bad taste to eat these berries that are ready to feed one other sense? The arum berries at the moment are in perfection,-cone-shaped spikes one and a half inches lengthy, of scarlet or vermilion-colored, irregular, considerably pear-shaped berries springing from a purplish core. Hundreds of crickets have fallen into a sandy gully, and now are incessantly striving to creep or leap up again on the sliding sand, out of this dusty highway into these bare solitudes which they inhabit; such their enterprise this September afternoon. Sept. 26, 1858. I observe that the seeds of the Panicum sanguinale and filiforme are perhaps half fallen, evidently affected by the late frosts as chestnuts, and many others., might be by later ones; and now’s the time, too, when flocks of sparrows start to scour over the weedy fields, especially in the morning.
After i might sit in a cold chamber, muffled in a cloak, every evening until Thanksgiving time, warmed by my very own ideas, the world was not a lot with me. Is it not a reproach that so much that is gorgeous is poisonous to us? Speaking to Rice of that cricket’s escape, he said that he as soon as, with several others, noticed a small striped snake swim throughout a bit of water about half a rod wide to a half-grown bull-frog which sat on the opposite shore, and attempt to seize him, but he found that he had caught a Tartar, for the bull-frog, seeing him coming, was not afraid of him, however at once seized his head in his mouth and closed his jaws upon it, and he thus held the snake a substantial time earlier than the latter was able, by struggling, to get away. I see a big black cricket on the river, a rod from shore, and a fish is leaping at it. When that cricket felt my oar he leaped with out the least hesitation, or maybe consideration, trusting to fall in a pleasanter place. It must have been a turtle-dove that eyed me so near, turned its head sidewise to me for a good view, trying with a St. Vitus twitching of its neck, as if to get better its steadiness on an unstable perch.