the pond in Sudbury, who
told me that it was he who got out this tree ten or fifteen years
before. As near as he could remember, it stood twelve or fifteen rods
from the shore, where the water was thirty or forty feet deep. It was
in the winter, and he had been getting out ice in the forenoon, and had
resolved that in the afternoon, with the aid of his neighbors, he would
take out the old yellow pine. He sawed a channel in the ice toward the
shore, and hauled it over and along and out on to the ice with oxen;
but, before he had gone far in his work, he was surprised to find that
it was wrong end upward, with the stumps of the branches pointing down,
and the small end firmly fastened in the sandy bottom. It was about
a foot in diameter at the big end, and he had expected to get a good
saw-log, but it was so rotten as to be fit only for fuel, if for that.
He had some of it in his shed then. There were marks of an axe and of
woodpeckers on the butt. He thought that it might have been a dead tree
on the shore, but was finally blown over into the pond, and after the
top had become water-logged, while the butt-end was still dry and light,
had drifted out and sunk wrong end up. His father, eighty years old,
could not remember when it was not there. Several pretty large logs may
still be seen lying on the bottom, where, owing to the undulation of the
surface, they look like huge water snakes in motion.

This pond has rarely been profaned by a boat, for there is little in it
to tempt a fisherman. Instead of the white lily, which requires mud, or
the common sweet flag, the blue flag (Iris versicolor) grows thinly in
the pure water, rising from the stony bottom all around the shore, where
it is visited by hummingbirds in June; and the color both of its bluish
blades and its flowers and especially their reflections, is in singular
harmony with the glaucous water.

White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth,
Lakes of Light. If they were permanently congealed, and small enough
to be clutched, they would, perchance, be carried off by slaves, like
precious stones, to adorn the heads of emperors; but being liquid, and
ample, and secured to us and our successors forever, we disregard them,
and run after the diamond of Kohinoor. They are too pure to have a
market value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our
lives, how much more transparent than our characters, are they! We
never learned meanness