with a few faint
blood-red ones very much like a trout. The specific name
_reticulatus_[67] would not apply to this; it should be _guttatus_[68]
rather. These are all very firm fish, and weigh more than their size
promises. The shiners, pouts, and perch, also, and indeed all the fishes
which inhabit this pond, are much cleaner, handsomer, and firmer fleshed
than those in the river and most other ponds, as the water is purer, and
they can easily be distinguished from them. Probably many ichthyologists
would make new varieties of some of them. There are also a clean race of
frogs and tortoises, and a few mussels in it; muskrats and minks leave
their traces about it, and occasionally a travelling mud-turtle visits
it. Sometimes, when I pushed off my boat in the morning, I disturbed a
great mud-turtle which had secreted himself under the boat in the night.
Ducks and geese frequent it in the spring and fall, the white-bellied
swallows (_Hirundo bicolor_) skim over it, and the peetweets (_Totanus
macularius_) "teter" along its stony shores all summer. I have sometimes
disturbed a fishhawk sitting on a white-pine over the water; but I doubt
if it is ever profaned by the wing of a gull, like Fair-Haven. At most,
it tolerates one annual loon. These are all the animals of consequence
which frequent it now.

You may see from a boat, in calm weather, near the sandy eastern shore,
where the water is eight or ten feet deep, and also in some other parts
of the pond, some circular heaps half a dozen feet in diameter by a foot
in height, consisting of small stones less than a hen's egg in size,
where all around is bare sand. At first you wonder if the Indians could
have formed them on the ice for any purpose, and so, when the ice
melted, they sank to the bottom; but they are too regular and some of
them plainly too fresh for that. They are similar to those found in
rivers; but as there are no suckers or lampreys here, I know not by what
fish they could be made. Perhaps they are the nests of the chivin. These
lend a pleasing mystery to the bottom.

The shore is irregular enough not to be monotonous. I have in my mind's
eye the western indented with deep bays, the bolder northern, and the
beautifully scalloped southern shore, where successive capes overlap
each other and suggest unexplored coves between. The forest has never
so good a setting, nor is so distinctly beautiful, as when seen from the
middle of a small lake amid hills which