198 
WALDEN. 
Some have been puzzled to tell how the shore be¬ 
came so regularly paved. My townsmen have all heard 
the tradition, the oldest people tell me that they heard 
it in their youth, that anciently the Indians were hold¬ 
ing a pow-wow upon a hill here, which rose as high into 
the heavens as the pond now sinks deep into the earth, 
and they used much profanity, as the story goes, though 
this vice is one of which the Indians were never guilty, 
and while they were thus engaged the hill shook and 
suddenly sank, and only one old squaw, named Walden, 
escaped, and from her the pond was named. It has 
been conjectured that when the hill shook these stones 
rolled down its side and became the present shore. It 
is very certain, at any rate, that once there was no pond 
here, and now there is one; and this Indian fable does 
not in any respect conflict with the account of that an¬ 
cient settler whom I have mentioned, who remembers 
so well when he first came here with his divining rod, 
saw a thin vapor rising from the sward, and the hazel 
pointed steadily downward, and he concluded to dig a 
well here. As for the stones, many still think that they 
are hardly to be accounted for by the action of the 
waves on these hills; but I observe that the surround¬ 
ing hills are remarkably full of the same kind of stones, 
so that they have been obliged to pile them up in walls 
on both sides of the railroad cut nearest the pond; and, 
moreover, there are most stones where the shore is most 
abrupt; so that, unfortunately, it is no longer a mystery 
to me. I detect the paver. If the name was not de¬ 
rived from that of some English locality, — Saffron Wal¬ 
den, for instance,—-one might suppose that it was called, 
originally, Walled-in Pond. 
The pond was my well ready dug. For four months 
