, who
instinctively follow other fashions and trust other authorities than
their townsmen, and by their goings and comings stitch towns together in
parts where else they would be ripped. They sit and eat their luncheon
in stout fear-naughts on the dry oak leaves on the shore, as wise in
natural lore as the citizen is in artificial. They never consulted with
books, and know and can tell much less than they have done. The things
which they practice are said not yet to be known. Here is one fishing
for pickerel with grown perch for bait. You look into his pail with
wonder as into a summer pond, as if he kept summer locked up at home, or
knew where she had retreated. How, pray, did he get these in midwinter?
Oh, he got worms out of rotten logs since the ground froze, and so he
caught them. His life itself passes deeper in nature than the studies
of the naturalist penetrate; himself a subject for the naturalist.
The latter raises the moss and bark gently with his knife in search of
insects; the former lays open logs to their core with his axe, and moss
and bark fly far and wide. He gets his living by barking trees. Such a
man has some right to fish, and I love to see nature carried out in him.
The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and
the fisher-man swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale
of being are filled.

When I strolled around the pond in misty weather I was sometimes amused
by the primitive mode which some ruder fisherman had adopted. He would
perhaps have placed alder branches over the narrow holes in the ice,
which were four or five rods apart and an equal distance from the shore,
and having fastened the end of the line to a stick to prevent its being
pulled through, have passed the slack line over a twig of the alder, a
foot or more above the ice, and tied a dry oak leaf to it, which, being
pulled down, would show when he had a bite. These alders loomed through
the mist at regular intervals as you walked half way round the pond.

Ah, the pickerel of Walden! when I see them lying on the ice, or in the
well which the fisherman cuts in the ice, making a little hole to admit
the water, I am always surprised by their rare beauty, as if they were
fabulous fishes, they are so foreign to the streets, even to the woods,
foreign as Arabia to our Concord life. They possess a quite dazzling
and transcendent beauty which separates them by a wide interval from the
cadaverous cod an