ISO ON A GLASS ROOF 



break the wind off the smaller specks. An ignoble 

 use, I thought, to put a lusty young tree to for so 

 short a time, presently to go drif ting about the lake, 

 doing no good to even so much as the eye of man. 

 How much it might have done if the axe had spared 

 it for a hundred years ! Oh, these cursed hackers 

 and hewers of trees! Will they never stay their 

 hands from destroying the beauty and goodness of 

 the earth? 



Every hole already had its man, if not its bush, 

 and I had to cut one for myself: so, slipping the 

 thong of the slick over my wrist, I began chiseling, 

 like a woodpecker mortising a tree for his grub, 

 only I was boring haphazard, while his feathered 

 ear or horny nose leads him straight to his prey. 

 I cannot hear a fish swim, nor smell one till he is 

 above water or in the frying-pan. But as a grub 

 might be anywhere in the wood, so might a fish 

 be anywhere in the water. I began to wonder how 

 many bushels of crystals one must hew to come to 

 the water of Petowbowk at this season ; but at last I 

 struck through to it, and it came to meet me faster 

 than I wished, before I got the bottom of the hole 

 big enough to let through the biggest fish I in- 

 tended to catch. 



Then I put a worm on my hook and dropped it 

 through the scuttle I had made in the glass roof of 

 the house of the fishes, and invited them up to take 

 a look at the sky which they had not seen for so 



