fills all the swamps, and when I look down, I see commonly the leaf of the gold-thread. . . .
June 23, 1853. . . . p. m. To White Pond. . . . After bathing, I paddled to the middle in the leaky boat. The heart-leaf, which grows thinly here, is an interesting plant, sometimes floating at the end of a solitary, almost invisible, thread-like stem, more than six feet long, and again many purplish stems intertwined into loose ropes, or like large skeins of silk, abruptly spreading at top, of course, into a perfectly flat shield, a foot or more in diameter, of small heart-shaped leaves, which rise or fall on their stems as the water is higher or lower. This perfectly horizontal disposition of the leaves in a single plane is an interesting and peculiar feature in water plants of this kind. Leaves and flowers made to float on the dividing line between two elements. . . .
In the warm noons now-a-days I see the spotted, small, yellow eyes of the four-leaved loose strife looking at me from under the birches and pines springing up in sandy, upland fields. . . . The other day I saw what I took to be a scarecrow in a cultivated field, and noting how unnaturally it was stuffed out here and there, and how ungainly its arms and legs were, I thought to myself, "Well, it is thus they make these things, they do not stand much about it," but
