_Aug. 23. Saturday._ To Walden to bathe at 5.30 A. M. Traces of the heavy rains in the night. The sand and gravel are beaten hard by them. Three or four showers in succession. But the grass is not so wet as after an ordinary dew. The _Verbena hastata_ at the pond has reached the top of its spike, a little in advance of what I noticed yesterday; only one or two flowers are adhering. At the commencement of my walk I saw no traces of fog, but after detected fogs over particular meadows and high up some brooks’ valleys, and far in the Deep Cut the wood fog. First muskmelon this morning. I rarely pass the shanty in the woods, where human beings are lodged, literally, no better than pigs in a sty,—little children, a grown man and his wife, and an aged grandmother living this squalid life, squatting on the ground,—but I wonder if it can be indeed true that little Julia Riordan calls this place home, comes here to rest at night and for her daily food,—in whom ladies and gentlemen in the village take an interest. Of what significance are charity and almshouses? That there they live unmolested! in one sense so many degrees below the almshouse! beneath charity! It is admirable,—Nature against almshouses. A certain wealth of nature, not poverty, it suggests. Not to identify health and contentment, aye, and independence, with the possession of this world’s goods! It is not wise to waste compassion on them. As I go through the Deep Cut, I hear one or two early humblebees, come out on the damp sandy bank, whose low hum sounds like distant horns from far in the horizon over the woods. It was long before I detected the bees that made it, so far away and musical it sounded, like the shepherds in some distant eastern vale greeting the king of day.[307] The farmers now carry—those who have got them—their early potatoes and onions to market, starting away early in the morning or at midnight. I see them returning in the afternoon with the empty barrels. Perchance the copious rain of last night will trouble those who had not been so provident as to get their hay from the Great Meadows, where it is often lost. * * * * * P. M.—Walk to Annursnack and back over stone bridge.