before we could get it into the boat. The very first pickerel
that I ever caught jumped into the air to seize a small fish dangling
on my line, and, missing its aim, fell plump into the boat as if it
had dropped from the sky.

Some of our neighbors fished for pickerel through the ice in
midwinter. They usually drove a wagon out on the lake, set a large
number of lines baited with live minnows, hung a loop of the lines
over a small bush planted at the side of each hole, and watched to see
the loops pulled off when a fish had taken the bait. Large quantities
of pickerel were often caught in this cruel way.

Our beautiful lake, named Fountain Lake by father, but Muir's Lake by
the neighbors, is one of the many small glacier lakes that adorn the
Wisconsin landscapes. It is fed by twenty or thirty meadow springs, is
about half a mile long, half as wide, and surrounded by low
finely-modeled hills dotted with oak and hickory, and meadows full of
grasses and sedges and many beautiful orchids and ferns. First there
is a zone of green, shining rushes, and just beyond the rushes a zone
of white and orange water-lilies fifty or sixty feet wide forming a
magnificent border. On bright days, when the lake was rippled by a
breeze, the lilies and sun-spangles danced together in radiant beauty,
and it became difficult to discriminate between them.

On Sundays, after or before chores and sermons and Bible-lessons, we
drifted about on the lake for hours, especially in lily time, getting
finest lessons and sermons from the water and flowers, ducks, fishes,
and muskrats. In particular we took Christ's advice and devoutly
"considered the lilies"--how they grow up in beauty out of gray lime
mud, and ride gloriously among the breezy sun-spangles. On our way
home we gathered grand bouquets of them to be kept fresh all the week.
No flower was hailed with greater wonder and admiration by the
European settlers in general--Scotch, English, and Irish--than this
white water-lily (_Nymphaea odorata_). It is a magnificent plant, queen
of the inland waters, pure white, three or four inches in diameter,
the most beautiful, sumptuous, and deliciously fragrant of all our
Wisconsin flowers. No lily garden in civilization we had ever seen
could compare with our lake garden.

The next most admirable flower in the estimation of settlers in this
part of the new world was the pasque-flower or wind-flower (_Anemone
patens_ var. _Nuttalliana_). It is the very