and a couple of eels, one weighing four pounds--I am thus particular
because the weight of a fish is commonly its only title to fame, and
these are the only eels I have heard of here; also, I have a faint
recollection of a little fish some five inches long, with silvery sides
and a greenish back, somewhat dace-like in its character, which I
mention here chiefly to link my facts to fable. Nevertheless, this pond
is not very fertile in fish. Its pickerel, though not abundant, are its
chief boast. I have seen at one time lying on the ice pickerel of at
least three different kinds: a long and shallow one, steel-colored, most
like those caught in the river; a bright golden kind, with greenish
reflections and remarkably deep, which is the most common here; and
another, golden-colored, and shaped like the last, but peppered on the
sides with small dark brown or black spots, intermixed 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,