Page:Literary pilgrimages of a naturalist (IA literarypilgrima00packrich).pdf/99

 you both with the same sudden sweep of its August fire. In the same sense you are the pond's ear and hear as it does. The morning rustle of the trees, shaking the dusk from their boughs, comes to you as a clear ecstasy, and you think you can hear the wan tinkling of the invisible feet of fairy mists as they leap sunward from the surface and vanish in the day. Over the wood comes the intermittent pulse of Concord waking, and by fainter reverberations the pond knows that Lincoln and more distant villages are astir. Then the first train of the day crashes by the southern margin and stuns the tympanum with a vast avalanche of uproar.

To plunge beneath the surface and escape this is to learn the real color of the pond. From without, on the banks, this varies. Oftenest it is a dull, clear green like that of alexandrite, a chrysoberyl gem from the mines of Ceylon and the Ural mountains. You see this best from the higher points of the hills along the borders and at certain angles of the sun the green shows red reflections and tints of blue as does the gem. If, swimming in the center, you will tip up as a duck