weeping back from its eastern and
northern, covered by a few sterile farms. I was never tired, when the
wind was still, of floating along its margin and gazing down into its
marvelously translucent depths. The boulders and fragments of rocks were
seen, at a depth of twenty-five or thirty feet, strewing its floor,
and apparently as free from any covering of sediment as when they were
dropped there by the old glaciers aeons ago. Our camp was amid a dense
grove of second growth of white pine on the eastern shore, where, for
one, I found a most admirable cradle in a little depression, outside of
the tent, carpeted with pine needles, in which to pass the night. The
camper-out is always in luck if he can find, sheltered by the trees, a
soft hole in the ground, even if he has a stone for a pillow. The earth
must open its arms a little for us even in life, if we are to sleep well
upon its bosom. I have often heard my grand-father, who was a soldier of
the Revolution, tell with great gusto how he once bivouacked in a little
hollow made by the overturning of a tree, and slept so soundly that he
did not wake up till his cradle was half full of water from a passing
shower.

What bird or other creature might represent the divinity of Pleasant
Pond I do not know, but its demon, as of most northern inland waters, is
the loon, and a very good demon he is too, suggesting something not so
much malevolent, as arch, sardonic, ubiquitous, circumventing, with just
a tinge of something inhuman and uncanny. His fiery red eyes gleaming
forth from that jet-black head are full of meaning. Then his strange
horse laughter by day and his weird, doleful cry at night, like that of
a lost and wandering spirit, recall no other bird or beast. He suggests
something almost supernatural in his alertness and amazing quickness,
cheating the shot and the bullet of the sportsman out of their aim. I
know of but one other bird so quick, and that is the humming-bird, which
I have never been able to kill with a gun. The loon laughs the shot-gun
to scorn, and the obliging young farmer above referred to told me he
had shot at them hundreds of times with his rifle, without effect,--they
always dodged his bullet. We had in our party a breach-loading rifle,
which weapon is perhaps an appreciable moment of time quicker than
the ordinary muzzleloader, and this the poor loon could not or did not
dodge. He had not timed himself to that species of fire-arm, and when,
with hi