A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH 105 



only in deep water upon a hook baited with salt 

 pork. And then you needed a letter of introduc- 

 tion to them. They were not to be tempted or 

 cajoled by strangers. We did not succeed in rais- 

 ing a fish, although instructed how it was to be 

 done, until one of the natives, a young and oblig- 

 ing farmer living hard by, came and lent his coun- 

 tenance 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 manoeuvred it as directed, and yet those 

 fish knew his hook from mine in sixty feet of 

 water, and preferred it four times in five. Evi- 

 dently 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 

 rugged 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 float- 

 ing along its margin and gazing down into its mar- 

 velously translucent depths. The bowlders and 

 fragments of rocks were seen, at a depth of twenty- 

 five or thirty feet, strewing its floor, and appar- 

 ently as free from any covering of sediment as when 

 they were dropped there by the old glaciers aeons 

 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 admirable cradle in a little 

 depression outside of the tent, carpeted with pine 

 needles, in which to pass the night. The camper- 



