Walden: "Baker Farm"–"Brute Neighbors"

...the wrinkled, sibyl-like, cone-headed infant that sat upon its father’s knee as in the palaces of nobles, and looked out from its home in the midst of wet and hunger inquisitively upon the stranger, with the privilege of infancy, not knowing but it was the last of a noble line, and the hope and cynosure of the world...

“You’d better go now, John,” said his wife, with glistening and hopeful face; but John demurred.

The repugnance to animal food is not the effect of experience, but is an instinct.

It is neither the quality nor the quantity, but the devotion to sensual savors; when that which is eaten is not a viand to sustain our animal, or inspire our spiritual life, but food for the worms that possess us.

They are not callow like the young of most birds, but more perfectly developed and precocious even than chickens.

Such an eye was not born when the bird was, but is coeval with the sky it reflects.

The traveller does not often look into such a limpid well.

The legions of these Myrmidons covered all the hills and vales in my wood-yard, and the ground was already strewn with the dead and dying, both red and black. It was the only battle which I have ever witnessed, the only battle-field I ever trod while the battle was raging; internecine war; the red republicans on the one hand, and the black imperialists on the other.

They fought with more pertinacity than bull-dogs.

Holding a microscope to the first-mentioned red ant, I saw that, though he was assiduously gnawing at the near fore-leg of his enemy, having severed his remaining feeler, his own breast was all torn away, exposing what vitals he had there to the jaws of the black warrior, whose breastplate was apparently too thick for him to pierce...

Many a village Bose, fit only to course a mud-turtle in a victualling cellar, sported his heavy quarters in the woods, without the knowledge of his master, and ineffectually smelled at old fox burrows and woodchucks’ holes; led perchance by some slight cur which nimbly threaded the wood, and might still inspire a natural terror in its denizens...

When I called to see her in June, 1842, she was gone a-hunting in the woods, as was her wont...

Some thought it was part flying-squirrel or some other wild animal, which is not impossible, for, according to naturalists, prolific hybrids have been produced by the union of the marten and domestic cat.

Once or twice I saw a ripple where he approached the surface, just put his head out to reconnoiter, and instantly dived again.

I concluded that he laughed in derision of my efforts, confident of his own resources.