46 A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH. 



spots, and tlie 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 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. 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 seons 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. 

 fable cradle in a little depression, outside of the tent, 

 carpeted with pine needles, in which to pass the night* 



