190 
WALDEN. 
caught pouts with a bunch of worms strung on a thread; 
and when we had done, far in the night, threw the 
burning brands high into the air like skyrockets, which, 
coming down into the pond, were quenched with a loud 
hissing, and we were suddenly groping in total dark¬ 
ness. Through this, whistling a tune, we took our way 
to the haunts of men again. But now I had made my 
home by the shore. 
Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the 
family had all retired, I have returned to the woods, and, 
partly with a view to the next day’s dinner, spent the 
hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, sere¬ 
naded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, 
the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. 
These experiences were very memorable and valuable 
to me, — anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or 
thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by 
thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the sur¬ 
face with their tails in the moonlight, and communicat¬ 
ing by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal 
fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or 
sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as 
I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feel¬ 
ing a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life 
prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blunder¬ 
ing purpose there, and slow to make up its mind. At 
length you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some 
horned pout squeaking and squirming to the upper air. 
It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your 
thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes 
in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to 
interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. 
It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into 
