and bleeding. I was dripping with
sweat, spangled like harlequin with scales, wet from the waist down,
nose peeled by the sun, but utterly, supremely, and consummately happy.
He, the beauty, the daisy, the darling, my Salmon Bahadur, weighed
twelve pounds, and I had been seven and thirty minutes bringing him to
bank! He had been lightly hooked on the angle of the right jaw, and the
hook had not wearied him. That hour I sat among princes and crowned
heads--greater than them all. Below the bank we heard California
scuffling with his salmon, and swearing Spanish oaths. Portland and I
assisted at the capture, and the fish dragged the spring-balance out by
the roots. It was only constructed to weigh up to fifteen pounds. We
stretched the three fish on the grass,--the eleven-and-a-half, the
twelve, and the fifteen-pounder, and we swore an oath that all who came
after should merely be weighed and put back again.

How shall I tell the glories of that day so that you may be interested?
Again and again did California and I prance down that little reach to
the little bay, each with a salmon in tow, and land him in the shallows.
Then Portland took my rod, and caught some ten-pounders, and my spoon
was carried away by an unknown leviathan. Each fish, for the merits of
the three that had died so gamely, was hastily hooked on the balance and
flung back, Portland recording the weight in a pocketbook, for he was a
real-estate man. Each fish fought for all he was worth, and none more
savagely than the smallest--a game little six-pounder. At the end of six
hours we added up the list. Total: 16 fish, aggregate weight, 142 lbs.
The score in detail runs something like this--it is only interesting to
those concerned: 15, 11-1/2, 12, 10, 9-3/4, 8, and so forth; as I have
said, nothing under six pounds, and three ten-pounders.

Very solemnly and thankfully we put up our rods--it was glory enough for
all time--and returned weeping in each other's arms--weeping tears of
pure joy--to that simple, barelegged family in the packing-case house by
the waterside.

WINTER ANIMALS

_By_ HENRY DAVID THOREAU

When the ponds were firmly frozen, they afforded not only new and
shorter routes to many points, but new views from their surfaces of the
familiar landscape around them. When I crossed Flint's Pond, after it
was covered with snow, though I had often paddled about and skated over
it, it was so unexpectedly wide and so strange that I could