The air is warmer than the rocks now. It is perfectly warm and I am tempted to stay out all night and observe each phenomenon of the night until day dawns. But if I should do so, I should not wonder if the town were raised to hunt me up. I could lie out here on this pinnacle rock all night without cold. To lie here on your back with nothing between your eye and the stars,—nothing but space,—they your nearest neighbors on that side, be they strange or be they tame, be they other worlds or merely ornaments to this, who could ever go to sleep under these circumstances? Sitting on the door-step of Conant house at 9 o’clock, I hear a pear drop. How few of all the apples that fall do we hear fall! I hear a horse _sneeze_ (?) from time to time in his pasture. He sees me and knows me to be a man, though I do not see him. I hear the nine o’clock bell ringing in Bedford. An unexpectedly musical sound that of a bell in the horizon always is. Pleasantly sounds the voice of one village to another. It is sweet as it is rare. Since I sat here a bright star has gone behind the stem of a tree, proving that my machine is moving,—proving it better for me than a rotating pendulum. I hear a solitary whip-poor-will, and a bullfrog on the river,—fewer sounds than in spring. The gray cliffs across the river are plain to be seen. And now the star appears on the other side of the tree, and I must go. Still no dew up here. I see three scythes hanging on an apple tree. There is the wild apple tree where hangs the forgotten scythe,[278]—the rock where the shoe was left. The woods and the separate trees cast longer shadows than by day, for the moon goes lower in her course at this season. Some dew at last in the meadow. As I recross the string-pieces of the bridge, I see the water-bugs swimming briskly in the moonlight. I scent the Roman wormwood in the potato-fields.