Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts 2.djvu/45

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gathered. Then came "a prickly clematis (viorna?) a thorn, cockspur-like (not pressed), the hackberry, with irregular-hearted lanceolate leaves; Smilax herbacea, downy-leaved variety; the waahoo, budded,—a ranunculus in the moist, grassy, lowish ground by Minnehaha,—what kind? a caulophyllum thalictrioides done blooming, and a Salix lucida." He also captured there "a bank-swallow's egg,—large,—is it not the rough-winged?"

While gathering these spoils he had "the rose-breasted grosbeak very abundant in the woods of the Minnehaha, singing robin-like all the while;" and he noted that "acorns are full as scarce as with us, picked up by the Spermophili, and no doubt planted by them. A man sustained himself one winter on the spermophiles which he shot with a pistol,—a little flavored with slippery-elm bark." This spermophile was the prairie-squirrel, whose habits were observed and noted in these same days of wandering round the Falls of St. Anthony and its vicinity. He is the Spermophilus tridecemlineatus, "erect, making a space look like a glove (?) over his hole, with

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