lake and in the meadow
springs, dancing to music we never could hear. The long-legged
skaters, too, seemed wonderful fellows, shuffling about on top of the
water, with air-bubbles like little bladders tangled under their hairy
feet; and we often wished that we also might be shod in the same way
to enable us to skate on the lake in summer as well as in icy winter.
Not less wonderful were the boatmen, swimming on their backs, pulling
themselves along with a pair of oar-like legs.

Great was the delight of brothers David and Daniel and myself when
father gave us a few pine boards for a boat, and it was a memorable
day when we got that boat built and launched into the lake. Never
shall I forget our first sail over the gradually deepening water, the
sunbeams pouring through it revealing the strange plants covering the
bottom, and the fishes coming about us, staring and wondering as if
the boat were a monstrous strange fish.

The water was so clear that it was almost invisible, and when we
floated slowly out over the plants and fishes, we seemed to be
miraculously sustained in the air while silently exploring a veritable
fairyland.

We always had to work hard, but if we worked still harder we were
occasionally allowed a little spell in the long summer evenings about
sundown to fish, and on Sundays an hour or two to sail quietly without
fishing-rod or gun when the lake was calm. Therefore we gradually
learned something about its inhabitants,--pickerel, sunfish, black
bass, perch, shiners, pumpkin-seeds, ducks, loons, turtles, muskrats,
etc. We saw the sunfishes making their nests in little openings in the
rushes where the water was only a few feet deep, ploughing up and
shoving away the soft gray mud with their noses, like pigs, forming
round bowls five or six inches in depth and about two feet in
diameter, in which their eggs were deposited. And with what beautiful,
unweariable devotion they watched and hovered over them and chased
away prowling spawn-eating enemies that ventured within a rod or two
of the precious nest!

The pickerel is a savage fish endowed with marvelous strength and
speed. It lies in wait for its prey on the bottom, perfectly
motionless like a waterlogged stick, watching everything that moves,
with fierce, hungry eyes. Oftentimes when we were fishing for some
other kinds over the edge of the boat, a pickerel that we had not
noticed would come like a bolt of lightning and seize the fish we had
caught