level field. Like the marmots in the surrounding hills, it closes its
eyelids and becomes dormant for three months or more. Standing on the
snow-covered plain, as if in a pasture amid the hills, I cut my way
first through a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window
under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet
parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window
of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer;
there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the amber twilight sky,
corresponding to the cool and even temperament of the inhabitants.
Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

Early in the morning, while all things are crisp with frost, men come
with fishing reels and slender lunch, and let down their fine lines
through the snowy field to take pickerel and perch; wild men, who
instinctively follow other fashions and trust other authorities than
their townsmen, and by their goings and comings stitch towns together in
parts where else they would be ripped. They sit and eat their luncheon
in stout fearnaughts on the dry oak leaves on the shore, as wise in
natural lore as the citizen is in artificial. They never consulted with
books, and know and can tell much less than they have done. The things
which they practice are said not yet to be known. Here is one fishing
for pickerel with grown perch for bait. You look into his pail with
wonder as into a summer pond, as if he kept summer locked up at home, or
knew where she had retreated. How, pray, did he get these in mid-winter?
Oh, he got worms out of rotten logs since the ground froze, and so he
caught them. His life itself passes deeper in Nature than the studies of
naturalist penetrate; himself a subject for the naturalist. The latter
raises the moss and bark gently with his knife in search of insects;
the former lays open logs to their core with his axe, and moss and bark
fly far and wide. He gets his living by barking trees. Such a man has
some right to fish, and I love to see Nature carried out in him. The
perch swallows the grubworm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the
fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of
being are filled.

When I strolled around the pond in misty weather I was sometimes amused
by the primitive mode which some ruder fisherman had adopted. He would
perhaps have placed alder branches over the narrow holes in the ice,
wh