Sept. 14. A great change in the weather from sultry to cold, from one thin coat to a thick coat or two thin ones.
2 p. m.—To Cliffs.
The dry grass yields a crisped sound to my feet. The white oak which appears to have made part of a hedge fence once, now standing in Hubbard’s fence near the Corner road, where it stretches along horizontally, is (one of its arms, for it has one running each way) two and a half feet thick, with a sprout growing perpendicularly out of it eighteen inches in diameter. The corn-stalks standing in stacks, in long rows along the edges of the corn-fields, remind me of stacks of muskets.
As soon as berries are gone, grapes come. The chalices of the Rhexia Virginica, deer-grass or meadow-beauty, are literally little reddish chalices now, though many still have petals,—
little cream pitchers.[372] The caducous polygala in cool places is faded almost white. I see the river at the foot of Fair Haven Hill running up-stream before the strong cool wind, which here strikes it from the north. The cold wind makes me shudder after my bath, before I get dressed.
Polygonum aviculare—knot-grass, goose-grass, or door-grass—still in bloom.
Sept. 15. Monday. Ice in the pail under the pump, and quite a frost.
Commenced perambulating the town bounds. At 7.30 a. m. rode in company with —— and Mr. —— to the bound between Acton and Concord near Paul Dudley’s. Mr. —— told a story of his wife walking in the fields somewhere, and, to keep the rain off, throwing her gown over her head and holding it in her mouth, and so being poisoned about her mouth from the skirts of her dress having come in contact with poisonous plants. At Dudley’s, which house is handsomely situated, with five large elms in front, we met the selectmen of Acton, —— —— and —— ——. Here were five of us. It appeared that we weighed, — —— I think about 160, —— 155, —— about 140, —— 130, myself 127. —— described the wall about or at Forest Hills Cemetery in Roxbury as being made of stones upon which they were careful to preserve the moss, so that it cannot be distinguished from a very old wall.
Found one intermediate bound-stone near the powder-mill drying-house on the bank of the river. The workmen there wore shoes without iron tacks. He said that the kernel-house was the most dangerous, the drying-house next, the press-house next. One of the powder-mill buildings in Concord? The potato vines and the beans which were still green are now blackened and flattened by the frost.