The distant lamps in the farmhouse look like fires. The trees and clouds are seen at a distance reflected in the river as by day. I see Fair Haven Pond from the Cliffs, as it were through a slight mist. It is the wildest scenery imaginable,—a Lake of the Woods. I just remembered the wildness of St. Anne’s. That’s the Ultima Thule of wildness to me. What an entertainment for the traveller, this incessant motion apparently of the moon traversing the clouds! Whether you sit or stand, it is always preparing new developments for you. It is event enough for simple minds. You all alone, the moon all alone, overcoming with incessant victory whole squadrons of clouds above the forests and the lakes and rivers and the mountains. You cannot always calculate which one the moon will undertake next.[276] I see a solitary firefly over the woods. The moon wading through clouds; though she is eclipsed by this one, I see her shining on a more distant but lower one. The entrance into Hubbard’s Wood above the spring, coming from the hill, is like the entrance to a cave; but when you are within, there are some streaks of light on the edge of the path. All these leaves so still, none whispering, no birds in motion,—how can I be else than still and thoughtful? _Aug. 6._ The motions of circus horses are not so expressive of music, do not harmonize so well with a strain of music, as those of animals of the cat kind. An Italian has just carried a hand-organ through the village. I hear it even at Walden Wood. It is as if a cheeta had skulked, howling, through the streets of the village, with knotted tail, and left its perfume there. Neglected gardens are full of fleabane (?) now, not yet in blossom. Thoroughwort has opened, and goldenrod is gradually opening. The smooth sumach shows its red fruit. The berries of the bristly aralia are turning dark. The wild holly’s scarlet fruit is seen and the red cherry (_Cerasus_). After how few steps, how little exertion, the student stands in pine woods above the Solomon’s-seal and the cow-wheat, in a place still unaccountably strange and wild to him, and to all civilization! This so easy and so common, though our literature implies that it is rare! We in the country make no report of the seals and sharks in our neighborhood to those in the city. We send them only our huckleberries, not free wild thoughts. Why does not man sleep all day as well as all night, it seems so very natural and easy? For what is he awake?