possession. These are the lips of the
lake on which no beard grows. It licks its chaps from time to time. When
the water is at its height, the alders, willows, and maples send forth a
mass of fibrous red roots several feet long from all sides of their
stems in the water, and to the height of three or four feet from the
ground, in the effort to maintain themselves; and I have known the high
blueberry bushes about the shore, which commonly produce no fruit, bear
an abundant crop under these circumstances.

Some have been puzzled to tell how the shore became so regularly paved.
My townsmen have all heard the tradition--the oldest people tell me that
they heard it in their youth--that anciently the Indians were holding a
pow-wow upon a hill here, which rose as high into the heavens as the
pond now sinks deep into the earth, and they used much profanity, as the
story goes, though this vice is one of which the Indians were never
guilty, and while they were thus engaged the hill shook and suddenly
sank, and only one old squaw, named Walden, escaped, and from her the
pond was named. It has been conjectured that when the hill shook, these
stones rolled down its side and became the present shore. It is very
certain, at any rate, that once there was no pond here, and now there is
one; and this Indian fable does not in any respect conflict with the
account of that ancient settler whom I have mentioned, who remembers so
well when he first came here with his divining-rod, saw a thin vapor
rising from the sward, and the hazel pointed steadily downward, and he
concluded to dig a well here. As for the stones, many still think that
they are hardly to be accounted for by the action of the waves on these
hills; but I observe that the surrounding hills are remarkably full of
the same kind of stones, so that they have been obliged to pile them up
in walls on both sides of the railroad cut nearest the pond; and,
moreover, there are most stones where the shore is most abrupt; so that,
unfortunately, it is no longer a mystery to me. I detect the paver. If
the name was not derived from that of some English locality--Saffron
Walden, for instance--one might suppose that is was called, originally,
_Walled-in_ Pond.

The pond was my well ready dug. For four months in the year its water is
as cold as it is pure at all times; and I think that it is then as good
as any, if not the best, in the town. In the winter, all water which is
exposed to the air