The birds utter a few languid and yawning notes, as if they had not left their perches, so sensible to light to wake so soon,—a faint peeping sound from I know not what kind, a slight, innocent, half-awake sound, like the sounds which a quiet housewife makes in the earliest dawn. Nature preserves her innocence like a beautiful child. I hear a wood thrush even now, long before sunrise, as in the heat of the day. And the pewee and the catbird and the vireo, red-eyed? I do not hear—or do not mind, perchance—the crickets now. Now whip-poor-wills commence to sing in earnest, considerably _after_ the wood thrush. The wood thrush, that beautiful singer, inviting the day once more to enter his pine woods. (So you may hear the wood thrush and whip-poor-will at the same time.) Now go by two whip-poor-wills, in haste seeking some coverts from the eye of day. And the bats are flying about on the edge of the wood, improving the last moments of their day in catching insects. The moon appears at length, not yet as a cloud, but with a frozen light, ominous of her fate. The early cars sound like a wind in the woods. The chewinks make a business now of waking each other up with their low _yorrick_ in the neighboring low copse. The sun would have shown before but for the cloud. Now, on his rising, not the clear sky, but the cheeks of the clouds high and wide, are tinged with red, which, like the sky before, turns gradually to saffron and then to the white light of day. The nettle-leaved vervain (_Verbena urticifolia_) by roadside at Emerson’s. What we have called hemp answers best to _Urtica dioica_, large stinging nettle? Now the great sunflower’s golden disk is seen. The days for some time have been sensibly shorter; there is time for music in the evening. I see polygonums in blossom by roadside, white and red. A eupatorium from Hubbard’s Bridge causeway answers to _E. purpureum_, except in these doubtful points, that the former has four leaves in a whorl, is unequally serrate, the stem is _nearly_ filled with a thin pith, the corymb is not merely terminal, florets eight and nine. Differs from _verticillatum_ in the stem being not solid, and I perceive no difference between calyx and corolla in color, if I know what the two are. It may be one of the intermediate varieties referred to. _Aug. 15. Friday._ _Hypericum Canadense_, Canadian St. John’s-wort, distinguished by its red capsules. The petals shine under the microscope, as if they had a golden dew on them. _Cnicus pumilus_, pasture thistle. How many insects a single one attracts! While you sit by it, bee after bee will visit it, and busy himself probing for honey and loading himself with pollen, regardless of your overshadowing presence. He sees its purple flower from afar, and that use there is in its color. _Oxalis stricta_, upright wood-sorrel, the little yellow ternate-leaved flower in pastures and corn-fields.