A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers - Pennsylvania State ...

weight of water standing over the grave, caused the earth to
settle where it had once been disturbed, and when the flood
went down, a sunken spot, exactly of the form and size of
the grave, revealed its locality; but this was now lost again,
and no future flood can detect it; yet, no doubt, Nature will
know how to point it out in due time, if it be necessary, by
methods yet more searching and unexpected. Thus there is
not only the crisis when the spirit ceases to inspire and expand
the body, marked by a fresh mound in the churchyard,
but there is also a crisis when the body ceases to take up
room as such in nature, marked by a fainter depression in
the earth.
We sat awhile to rest us here upon the brink of the western
bank, surrounded by the glossy leaves of the red variety of
the mountain laurel, just above the head of Wicasuck Island,
where we could observe some scows which were loading with
clay from the opposite shore, and also overlook the grounds
of the farmer, of whom I have spoken, who once hospitably
entertained us for a night. He had on his pleasant farm, besides
an abundance of the beach-plum, or Prunus littoralis,
which grew wild, the Canada plum under cultivation, fine
Henry David Thoreau
279
Porter apples, some peaches, and large patches of musk and
water melons, which he cultivated for the Lowell market.
Elisha’s apple-tree, too, bore a native fruit, which was prized
by the family. He raised the blood peach, which, as he showed
us with satisfaction, was more like the oak in the color of its
bark and in the setting of its branches, and was less liable to
break down under the weight of the fruit, or the snow, than
other varieties. It was of slower growth, and its branches strong
and tough. There, also, was his nursery of native apple-trees,
thickly set upon the bank, which cost but little care, and
which he sold to the neighboring farmers when they were
five or six years old. To see a single peach upon its stem makes
an impression of paradisaical fertility and luxury. This reminded
us even of an old Roman farm, as described by
Varro:—Caesar Vopiscus Aedilicius, when he pleaded before
the Censors, said that the grounds of Rosea were the garden
(sumen the tid-bit) of Italy, in which a pole being left would
not be visible the day after, on account of the growth of the
herbage. This soil may not have been remarkably fertile, yet
at this distance we thought that this anecdote might be told
of the Tyngsborough farm.