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.
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 think of nothing but Baffin's Bay. The Lincoln hills rose up around me at the extremity of a snowy plain, in which I did not remember to have stood before; and the fishermen, at an indeterminable distance over the ice, moving slowly about with their wolfish dogs, passed for sealers or Esquimaux, or in misty weather loomed like fabulous creatures, and I did not know whether they were giants or pygmies. I took this course when I went to lecture in Lincoln in the evening, traveling in no road and passing no house between my hut and the lecture room. In Goose Pond, which lay in my way, a colony of muskrats dwelt, and raised their cabins high above the ice, though none could be seen abroad when I crossed it. Walden, being like the rest usually bare of snow, or with only shallow and interrupted drifts on it, was my yard, where I could walk freely when the snow was nearly two feet deep on a level elsewhere and the villagers were confined to their streets. There, far from the village street, and, except at very long intervals, from the jingle of sleigh bells, I slid and skated, as in a vast moose-yard well trodden, overhung by oak woods and solemn pines bent down with snow or bristling with icicles.