In October I went a-graping to the river meadows,and loaded myself with clusters more precious for their beauty and fragrance than for food.There,too,I admired,though I did not gather,the cranberries,small waxen gems,pendants of the meadow grass,pearly and red,which the farmer plucks with an ugly rake,leaving the smooth meadow in a snarl,heedlessly measuring them by the bushel and the dollar only,and sells the spoils of the meads to Boston and New York:destined to be jammed,to satisfy the tastes of lovers of Nature there.So butchers rake the tongues of bison out of the prairie grass,regardless of the torn and drooping plant.The barberry's brilliant fruit was likewise food for my eyes merely;but I collected a small store of wild apples for coddling,which the proprietor and travellers had overlooked.When chestnuts were ripe I laid up half a bushel for winter.It was very exciting at that season to roam the then boundless chestnut woods of Lincoln,-they now sleep their long sleep under the railroad,-with a bag on my shoulder,and a stick to open burs with in my hand,for I did not always wait for the frost,amid the rustling of leaves and the loud reproofs of the red squirrels and the jays,whose half-consumed nuts I sometimes stole,for the burs which they had selected were sure to contain sound ones.Occasionally I climbed and shook the trees.They grew also behind my house,and one large tree,which almost overshadowed it,was,when in flower,a bouquet which scented the whole neighborhood,but the squirrels and the jays got most of its fruit;the last coming in flocks early in the morning and picking the nuts out of the burs before they fell.I relinquished these trees to them and visited the more distant woods composed wholly of chestnut.These nuts,as far as they went,were a good substitute for bread.Many other substitutes might,perhaps,be found.Digging one day for fishworms,I discovered the ground-nut (Apios tuberosa)on its string,the potato of the aborigines,a sort of fabulous fruit,which I had begun to doubt if I had ever dug and eaten in childhood,as I had told,and had not dreamed it.I had often since seen its crimpled red velvety blossom supported by the stems of other plants without knowing it to be the same.Cultivation has well-nigh exterminated it.It has a sweetish taste,much like that of a frost-bitten potato,and I found it better boiled than roasted.This tuber seemed like a faint promise of Nature to rear her own children and feed them simply here at some future period.In these days of fatted cattle and waving grain-fields this humble root,which was once the totem of an Indian tribe,is quite forgotten,or known only by its flowering vine;but let wild Nature reign here once more,and the tender and luxurious English grains will probably disappear before a myriad of foes,and without the care of man the crow may carry back even the last seed of corn to the great cornfield of the Indian's God in the southwest,whence he is said to have brought it;but the now almost exterminated ground-nut will perhaps revive and flourish in spite of frosts and wildness,prove itself indigenous,and resume its ancient importance and dignity as the diet of the hunter tribe.Some Indian Ceres or Minerva must have been the inventor and bestower of it;and when the reign of poetry commences here,its leaves and string of nuts may be represented on our works of art.
Already,by the first of September,I had seen two or three small maples turned scarlet across the pond,beneath where the white stems of three aspens diverged,at the point of a promontory,next the water.Ah,many a tale their color told!And gradually from week to week the character of each tree came out,and it admired itself reflected in the smooth mirror of the lake.Each morning the manager of this gallery substituted some new picture,distinguished by more brilliant or harmonious coloring,for the old upon the walls.
The wasps came by thousands to my lodge in October,as to winter quarters,and settled on my windows within and on the walls overhead,sometimes deterring visitors from entering.Each morning,when they were numbed with cold,I swept some of them out,but I did not trouble myself much to get rid of them;I even felt complimented by their regarding my house as a desirable shelter.They never molested me seriously,though they bedded with me;and they gradually disappeared,into what crevices I do not know,avoiding winter and unspeakable cold.
Like the wasps,before I finally went into winter quarters in November,I used to resort to the northeast side of Walden,which the sun,reflected from the pitch pine woods and the stony shore,made the fireside of the pond;it is so much pleasanter and wholesomer to be warmed by the sun while you can be,than by an artificial fire.I thus warmed myself by the still glowing embers which the summer,like a departed hunter,had left.
