Page:Literary pilgrimages of a naturalist (IA literarypilgrima00packrich).pdf/113

 *posite shore, and with a flash the mystery of the place returned. The cove where it burned seemed infinitely far withdrawn, and about it stalked shadowy giants who were the fishermen. Their voices, coming in brief sentences and at long intervals, were as weird as their shadows and as unsubstantial, from that immense distance to which they seemed withdrawn. The whole was a mystery of the elder earth, as if man had fished here before the flood and came, a shade among the shadows, to try it again.

By and by the fishing fire ceased to flare and sank to a red glow of embers. The dense clouds, tempest-drawn toward distant skies, dropped southward. The moon rode out of them and all dignity and crystal beauty returned to the pond, no longer little but wide and deep and mysterious. Down the moon's radiance a spirit of fire strode, walking the water along a path of golden light, right into Thoreau's cove as I sat there on his shore. The pond was once again a well of crystal, now leading from the zenith to the nadir, and the white radiance of its spirit made mountain peaks of snow-white grandeur of the receding clouds.