the farmer has gone forth with his formidable scythe, weapon of time, Time’s weapon, and fought the ground inch by inch. It is the summer’s enterprise. And if we were a more poetic people, horns would be blown to celebrate its completion. There might be a Haymakers’ Day. New England’s peaceful battles. At Bunker Hill there were some who stood at the rail-fence and behind the winrows of new-mown hay.[284] They have not yet quitted the field. They stand there still; they alone have not retreated. The _Polygala sanguinea_, caducous polygala, in damp ground, with red or purple heads. The dandelion still blossoms, and the lupine still, belated. I have been to Tarbell’s Swamp by the Second Division this afternoon, and to the Marlborough road. It has promised rain all day; cloudy and still and rather cool; from time to time a few drops gently spitting, but no shower. The landscape wears a sober autumnal look. I hear a drop or two on my hat. I wear a thick coat. The birds seem to know that it will not rain just yet. The swallows skim low over the pastures, twittering as they fly near me with forked tail, dashing near me as if I scared up insects for them. I see where a squirrel has been eating hazelnuts on a stump. Tarbell’s Swamp is mainly composed of low and even but dense beds of _Andromeda calyculata_, or dwarf andromeda, which bears the early flower in the spring. Here and there, mingled with it, is the water (?) andromeda; also pitch pines, birches, hardhack, and the common alder (_Alnus serrulata_), and, in separate and lower beds, the cranberry; and probably the _Rhodora Canadensis_ might be found. The lead-colored berries of the _Viburnum dentatum_ now. Cow-wheat and indigo-weed still in bloom by the dry wood-path-side, and Norway cinquefoil. I detected a wild apple on the Marlborough road by its fragrance, in the thick woods; small stems, four inches in diameter, falling over or leaning like rays on every side; a clean white fruit, the ripest yellowish, a pleasant acid. The fruit covered the ground. It is unusual to meet with an early apple thus wild in the thickest woods. It seemed admirable to me. One of the noblest of fruits. With green specks under the skin. _Prenanthes alba_, white-flowering prenanthes, with its strange halbert and variously shaped leaves; neottia; and hypericum. I hear the rain (11 P. M.) distilling upon the ground, wetting the grass and leaves. The melons needed it. Their leaves were curled and their fruit stinted. I am less somnolent for the cool season. I wake to a perennial day. The hayer’s work is done, but I hear no boasting, no firing of guns nor ringing of bells. He celebrates it by going about the work he had postponed “till after haying”! If all this steadiness and valor were spent upon some still worthier enterprise!!