Wet grounds about the edges of swamps
look dry with them. At one swamp, where I was surveying, thinking to
step on a leafy shore from a rail, I got into the water more than a foot
deep.
When I go to the river the day after the principal fall of leaves, the
sixteenth, I find my boat all covered, bottom and seats, with the leaves
of the Golden Willow under which it is moored, and I set sail with a
cargo of them rustling under my feet. If I empty it, it will be full
again to-morrow. I do not regard them as litter, to be swept out, but
accept them as suitable straw or matting for the bottom of my carriage.
When I turn up into the mouth of the Assabet, which is wooded, large
fleets of leaves are floating on its surface, as it were getting out to
sea, with room to tack; but next the shore, a little farther up, they
are thicker than foam, quite concealing the water for a rod in width,
under and amid the Alders, Button-Bushes, and Maples, still perfectly
light and dry, with fibre unrelaxed; and at a rocky bend where they are
met and stopped by the morning wind, they sometimes form a broad and
dense crescent quite across the river. When I turn my prow that way, and
the wave which it makes strikes them, list what a pleasant rustling from
these dry substances grating on one another! Often it is their
undulation only which reveals the water beneath them.
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