46 A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH. 
spots, and the straight lateral line is but a faint pencil 
mark. They appeared to be a species of lake trout 
peculiar to these waters, uniformly from ten to twelve 
inches in length. And these beautiful fish, at the time 
of our visit (last of August) at least, were to be 
taken only in deep water upon a hook baited with salt 
pork. And then you needed a letter of introduction 
to them. ‘They were not to be tempted or cajoled by 
strangers. We did not succeed in raising a fish, al- 
though instructed how it was to be done, until one of 
the natives, a young and obliging farmer living hard 
by, came and lent his countenance to the enterprise. 
I sat in one end of the boat and he in the other; my 
pork was the same as his, and I manceuvred it as 
directed, and yet those fish knew his hook from mine 
in sixty feet of water, and preferred it four times in 
five. Evidently they did not bite because they were 
hungry, but solely for old acquaintance’ sake. 
Pleasant Pond is an irregular sheet of water, two 
miles or more in its greatest diameter, with high, rug- 
ged mountains rising up from its western shore, and 
low rolling hills sweeping back from its eastern and 
northern, covered by a few sterile farms. I was never 
tired, when the wind was still, of floating along its 
margin and gazing down into its marvelously trans- 
lucent depths. The bowlders and fragments of rocks 
were seen, at a depth of twenty-five or thirty feet, 
strewing its floor, and apparently as free from any 
covering of sediment as when they were dropped there 
by the old glaciers zons ago. Our camp was amid a 
dense grove of second growth of white pine on the 
eastern shore, where, for one, I found a most admi. 
rable cradle in a little depression, outside of the tent, 
earpeted with pine needles, in which to pass the night, 
