STILL WATERS 
191 
margins. Almost every town has a local body 
of water of this description which answers to 
the adjective of ‘‘ Silver,” “ Blue,” “ Fresh,” 
or ** White.” The sarcasm of the name 
is unconscious but not the less biting, for 
the pond is generally a stagnant, malarious 
little place, with the frog, the bull-head, and 
the snake for occupants—its waters yellow and 
its shores green with scum and_parasitical 
vegetation. Its principal charm lies in what it 
may reflect of light and color from the sky. 
Quite different from this is the pond that lies 
away from civilization, hidden, perhaps, in the 
depths of some forest where tall trees come 
close down to the shore and peer into the 
water, where the vines and underbrush make 
an almost inaccessible bank, and where the 
brown water, lying over sunken trees and beds 
of leaves, makes a dark mirror for the sky. 
The silence, the solitude, the utter isolation 
of the woodland lake seem to give it inter- 
est. So, too, with the prairie pond, lying 
out on the treeless plains in its fringe of wild 
rice—the spot where once the swan and the 
wild goose paused in their migratory flights, 
where once the buffalo came to wallow, and the 
Indian and his pony to drink. Birds and 
The forest 
pond. 
