lance. He was as gentle and modest as a girl; his sensibilities were
like plants that grow in the shade. The woods and the solitudes had
touched him with their own softening and refining influence; had indeed
shed upon his soil of life a rich deep leaf mould that was delightful,
and that nursed, half concealed, the tenderest and wildest growths.
There was grit enough back of and beneath it all, but he presented
none of the rough and repelling traits of character of the conventional
backwoods-man. In the spring he was a driver of logs on the Kennebec,
usually having charge of a large gang of men; in the winter he was a
solitary trapper and hunter in the forests.

Our first glimpse of Maine waters was Pleasant Pond, which we found by
following a white, rapid, musical stream from the Kennebec three
miles back into the mountains. Maine waters are for the most part
dark-complexioned, Indian-colored streams, but Pleasant Pond is a
pale-face among them both in name and nature. It is the only strictly
silver lake I ever saw. Its waters seem almost artificially white and
brilliant, though of remarkable transparency. I think I detected minute
shining motes held in suspension in it. As for the trout they are
veritable bars of silver until you have cut their flesh, when they
are the reddest of gold. They have no crimson or other spots, and the
straight lateral line is but a faint pencil mark. They appeared to be
a species of lake trout peculiar to these waters, uniformly from ten to
twelve inches in length. And these beautiful fish, at the time of our
visit (last of August) at least, were to be taken only in deep water
upon a hook baited with salt pork. And then you needed a letter
of introduction to them. They were not to be tempted or cajoled by
strangers. We did not succeed in raising a fish, although instructed how
it was to be done, until one of the natives, a young and obliging farmer
living hard by, came and lent his countenance to the enterprise. I sat
in one end of the boat and he in the other; my pork was the same as his,
and I maneuvered it as directed, and yet those fish knew his hook
from mine in sixty feet of water, and preferred it four times in five.
Evidently they did not bite because they were hungry, but solely for old
acquaintance' sake.

Pleasant Pond is an irregular sheet of water, two miles or more in
its greatest diameter, with high, rugged mountains rising up from its
western shore, and low rolling hills s