or Pickerel, a family of voracious fishes. The body of a pike is long and almost cylindrical, with a long, flat snout fitted with teeth worthy of a shark. Jordan says there are five species: the American pickerel, dark green, in coastwise streams, length twelve inches, Massachusetts to Florida; the little pickerel, length twelve inches, olive green, sides marked with dark curved stripes like worm tracks, found in the small streams and bayous of the Mississippi; the eastern pickerel, green, with a network of side markings, length thirty inches, Maine to Alaska, not west of the Alleghanies,--the kind that Whittier failed to land; the pike, northern pike, or northern pickerel, grayish with whitish round spots, length thirty to fifty inches, found in Europe, Asia, and North America from Lake Champlain to Alaska; and largest of all, the muskallunge, dark gray with round blackish spots, length up to eight feet. It is a magnificent fish and is found in the Great Lake region and northwestward. The wall-eyed pike, so-called, is more nearly a bass. Pickerel or pike are not favorite kinds of fish. Although the flesh of cold water pickerel is firm and white there is more or less prejudice against it. The indictment contains a long list of charges. It is the most voracious fish in our waters. It exterminates other fish and eats anything with the least appearance of life. In Europe it is considered a meaner trick to put pike in a gentleman's fish pond than to turn a horse loose in the kitchen garden. Thoreau had an eye to the picturesque qualities: The pike is a solemn, stately, ruminant fish, lurking under the shadow of a lily-pad at noon, with still, circumspect, voracious eye, motionless as a jewel set in water, or moving slowly along to take up its position; darting from time to time at such unlucky fish or frog or insect as comes within its range, and swallowing it at a gulp. Sometimes a striped snake, bound for greener meadows across the stream, ends its undulatory progress in the same receptacle.