see me, in its donkeyish way.  Afterwards, E——­ and I took a ramble among some of his old haunts, which took up pretty much all the remainder of the forenoon.  After dinner we drove to New Ipswich, expecting to see the closing scenes of the muster, but found the regiment dismissed, and the spectators taking their departure.  We visited a cousin of E——­, and took tea; borrowed two great-coats (it having grown from summer to autumn very rapidly since nightfall), and drove home, six miles or thereabouts.  A new moon and the long twilight gleamed over the first portion of our drive, and then the northern lights kindled up and shot flashes towards the zenith as we drove along, up hill and down dale, and most of the way through dense woods.

The next morning, after breakfast, we got into our wagon and returned to Milford, thence by stage to Danforth’s Corner, thence to Boston by rail.  Nothing noteworthy occurred, except that we called on Mr. Atherton and lady at Nashua.  We reached Boston at three o’clock.  I visited the Town and Country Club, and read the papers and journals, took the three quarters past five train and reached home at half past six.

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In the new statistical account of Scotland, in the volume about the Hebrides, it is stated that a child was born, and lived to the age of, I think, two years, with an eye in the back of its head, in addition to the usual complement in front.  It could evidently see with this eye; for when its cap was drawn down over it, it would thrust it upward.

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October 27.—­Mrs.——­ gave a black woman six dollars for a dress of pine-apple cloth, sixteen yards, perhaps worth ten times as much,—­the owner being ignorant of the value.

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To inherit a great fortune.—­To inherit a great misfortune.

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Reflections in a mud-puddle;—­they might be pictures of life in a mean street of a city.

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February 16, 1850.—­The sunbeam that comes through a round hole in the shutter of a darkened room, where a dead man sits in solitude.

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The hoary periwig of a dandelion gone to seed.

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Lenox, July 14, 1850.—­Language,—­human language,—­after all, is but little better than the croak and cackle of fowls, and other utterances of brute nature, sometimes not so adequate.

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The queer gestures and sounds of a hen looking about for a place to deposit her egg, her self-important gait, the sideway turn of her head and cock of her eye, as she pries into one and another nook, croaking all the while, evidently with the idea that the egg in question is the most important thing that has been brought to pass since the world began.  A speckled black and white and tufted hen of ours does it to most ludicrous perfection.