moon travelling over the ribbed bottom, which was strewed with the
wrecks of the forest. Formerly I had come to this pond adventurously,
from time to time, in dark summer nights, with a companion, and making a
fire close to the water's edge, which we thought attracted the fishes,
we caught pouts with a bunch of worms strung on a thread; and when we
had done, far in the night, threw the burning brands high into the air
like sky-rockets, which, coming down into the pond, were quenched with a
loud hissing, and we were suddenly groping in total darkness. Through
this, whistling a tune, we took our way to the haunts of men again. But
now I had made my home by the shore.

Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had all
retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view to the
next day's dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by
moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time,
the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. These experiences
were very memorable and valuable to me,--anchored in forty feet of
water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by
thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their
tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with
mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below,
or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in
the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along
it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull
uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind. At
length you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some homed pout
squeaking and squirming to the upper air. It was very queer, especially
in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal
themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to
interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I