THE PONDS. 
215 
place measures fourteen inches in diameter.” In the 
spring of ? 49 I talked with the man who lives nearest 
the pond‘in Sudbury, who told me that it was he who 
got out this tree ten or fifteen years before. As near 
as he could remember, it stood twelve or fifteen rods 
from the shore, where the water was thirty or forty feet 
deep. It was in the winter, and he had been getting 
out ice in the forenoon, and had resolved that in the 
afternoon, with the aid of his neighbors, he would take 
out the old yellow-pine. He sawed a channel in the ice 
toward the shore, and hauled it over and along and out 
on to the ice with oxen; but, before he had gone far in 
his work, he was surprised to find that it was wrong end 
upward, with the stumps of the branches pointing down, 
and the small end firmly fastened in the sandy bottom. 
It was about a foot in diameter at the big end, and he 
had expected to get a good saw-log, but it was so rotten 
as to be fit only for fuel, if for that. He had some of it 
in his shed then. There were marks of an axe and of 
woodpeckers on the but. He thought that it might have 
been a dead tree on the shore, but was finally blown 
over into the pond, and after the top had become water¬ 
logged, while the but-end was still dry and light, had 
drifted out and sunk wrong end up. His father, eighty 
years old, could not remember when it was not there. 
Several pretty large logs may still be seen lying on the 
bottom, where, owing to. the undulation of the surface, 
they look like huge water snakes in motion. 
This pond has rarely been profaned by a boat, for 
there is little in it to tempt a fisherman. Instead of the 
white lily, which requires mud, or the common sweet 
flag, the blue flag (Iris versicolor) grows thinly in the 
pure water, rising from the stony bottom all around the 
