A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH. 117 



troduction to them. They were not to be tempted or 

 cajoled by strangers. We did not succeed in raising 

 a fish, although 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 ma- 

 no3uvred 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 ac- 

 quaintance' 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 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-out is always in luck if he can 

 find, sheltered by the trees, a soft hole in the ground, 



