Chapter 68 Lake - 6

On such a day, September or October, Walden is a perfect mirror of the forest, bordered on all sides with stones, precious and rare to me.Nothing is so beautiful, so pure, and at the same time so large, as this lake lying on the surface of the earth.Autumn is long.It doesn't need a fence.When a nation comes or goes, it cannot be tarnished.This mirror, which no stone can break, whose quicksilver can never be wiped off, whose outward ornament Nature is often there to make up; no storm, no grime, can dull its ever-new surface;— —This mirror, if any uncleanness falls on it, it settles immediately, and the brush of the sun's mist is always brushing it, —This is the dust cloth of light, —breathing on it, it also leaves When it becomes a cloud, it floats from the surface of the water to high in the air, but immediately reflects it in its bosom.

Even the elves in the air could not escape the flood.It is constantly receiving new life and new movements from above.The lake is the medium between the earth and the sky.On the earth, only the grass and trees are swaying like waves, but the water itself is rippled by the wind.I can see the wind blowing from a thread or a flash.It was amazing that we could look down on the waves.Perhaps we should look down on the surface of the sky like this, to see if there is a finer spirit sweeping across it. By the second half of October, the skimmers and water scorpions had finally ceased to appear, and the severe frost had set in; so that in November, as is usually the case in fair weather, nothing stirred the water.One afternoon in mid-November, when the rain that had been falling for several days finally stopped, and the sky was still all overcast and full of fog, I found the lake to be so strangely calm that I could hardly see its surface came, and though it no longer reflected the bright colors of October, it reflected the dark colors of November on the surrounding hills.So I went boating on the lake as quietly as possible, and the weak water waves stirred up by the stern of the boat continued to extend beyond my field of vision, and the reflection on the lake was endlessly tortuous.However, when I looked at the surface of the water, I saw a gleam here and there from a distance, as if some water-grabbing insects that had escaped the severe frost were gathering again. The source of the water is also felt unconsciously on the surface of the water.Paddle those places where I am amazed to find myself surrounded by billions of small perch, all five inches long; richly coppery in the green water, where they play, often rising to When the water surface comes, give some small eddies to the water surface, and sometimes leave some small blisters on it.In such transparent, seemingly bottomless water that reflects clouds, I seem to be floating in the air in a light balloon, and the swimming of the perch seems to be hovering and flying, as if they have become a group of birds. At the same height, they fly around left or right; their fins, like sails, are fully stretched.There are many of these in this lake, and it is evident that they have to improve, and in the brief season before the ice-curtain falls in winter, which shuts them from the sky, sometimes the waves stirred by them seem to be blown by a breeze, Or like a gentle drizzle falling.When I approached them casually; they panicked, and with a sudden sweep of their tails, the splash was as if someone had whipped the water with a brush-like branch, and immediately they all took refuge in the deep water.Then the wind picked up and the fog thickened and the water started to flow and the bass jumped higher than before, half out of the water and all at once, a hundred black spots, all three inches long.One year, until the 5th of December, I still saw dimples on the surface of the water, and I thought it was going to rain heavily, and the air was filled with fog, so I hurriedly sat on the paddle seat and paddled home Go: The raindrops have been getting bigger and bigger, but I don't feel the raindrops hitting my cheeks. At that time, I thought I was going to be soaked all over.But all of a sudden the eddies disappeared, and it turned out that the bass had stirred them up, and the sound of my oars finally scared them back into the deep water; I saw them disappearing in groups!My whole body has been dry this afternoon.

An old man who used to come to the lake about sixty years ago, when darkness fell over the surrounding woods, came to tell me that in his time the lake was sometimes very lively, full of ducks and other water-fowl, and there were many Eagles are circling.He had come here to fish in an old canoe he had found ashore.It was made of two white pines, hollowed out in the middle, nailed together, and cut into squares at both ends.It was clumsy, but it took many years to fill it with water, and it may have sunk to the bottom of the lake since then.He didn't know who it belonged to; or if it belonged to the lake.He used to bundle strips of hickory bark to make anchor cables.Another old man, a potter, who lived by the lake before the revolution, once told him that there was a big iron box at the bottom of the lake, and he had seen it before.Sometimes, it will float to the shore, but when you approach it, it will go back to the deep water and disappear.I was amused to hear what was said about the canoe, which took the place of another Indian, made of the same materials, but much more elegantly built.At first it was probably a tree on the shore, and then it seemed to have fallen into the lake and drifted there for a generation. It is really a suitable ship for this lake.I remember the first time I gazed into the depths of this lake, I vaguely saw many large tree trunks lying on the bottom of the lake. If they were not broken by the strong wind, they were felled and parked on the ice, because at that time the wood The price of the tree is much cheaper, but now, most of these tree trunks have disappeared.