Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/130

120 the chuckling, rattling sound of some unseen bird on the near trees.—The night-hawk booms wide awake.

As I approached the pond down Hubbard's path, after coming out of the woods into a warmer air, I saw the shimmering of the moon on its surface; and in the near, now flooded cove, the water bugs, now darting, circling about, made streaks or curves of light. The moon's inverted pyramid of shimmering light commenced about twenty rocls off, like so much micaceous sand. But I was startled to see midway in the dark water, a bright flame like more than phosphorescent light, crowning the crests of the wavelets, which at first I mistook for fire-flies It had the appearance of a pure smokeless flame, half a dozen inches long, rising from the water and bending flickeringly along its surface. I thought of St. Elmo's lights and the like. But coming near to the shore of the pond itself, these flames increased, and I saw that even this was so many broken reflections of the moon's disk, though one would have said they were of an intenser light than the moon herself. From contrast with the surrounding water they were. Standing up close to the shore and nearer the rippled surface, I saw the reflections of the moon sliding clown the watery concave, like so many lustrous burnished coins poured from a bag with