AMONG THE "THOUSAND ISLANDS." 347 



the enormous ice-sheets of the Glacial epoch. The granite of the chain 

 is very hard and pure ; it is quarried in large masses, indeed, for monu- 

 mental and building purposes, among these very islands ; and so the 

 great river, unable to cut itself as profound a channel as it might other- 

 wise have done in a more yielding rock, has spread itself out in wide 

 pools over a broad and shallow bed, only deep enough for large navi- 

 gation by river-steamers in two or three well-recognized currents. 

 The main line of the Grand Trunk Railway, in fact, between Kings- 

 ton and Montreal, traverses this same low, granite range, and exhibits 

 very clearly the conditions precedent for the production of so strange 

 and beautiful a phenomenon as the Thousand Islands. The range con- 

 sists of numerous crouching, ice-worn mounds or hillocks, shaped ex- 

 actly like a pig's back or, to be more respectful, let us say an ele- 

 phant's, or a basking whale's while in between them lie deep grooves, 

 or valleys, equally ice-worn, all running parallel and scratched alike, 

 as is necessarily the case with the grooves due to the downward move- 

 ment of a single great glacier or ice-sheet. Now, the average width 

 of the St. Lawrence under normal circumstances, when it isn't trying, 

 Yankee fashion, to do a big thing, is about a mile or a mile and a half. 

 But when it encounters this belt of ancient ice-worn gneiss, with its 

 accompanying dales, it spreads itself out into a sort of encumbered 

 lake some ten or fifteen miles wide, filling up the grooves and inter- 

 stices between the rounded humps, but leaving the higher mounds or 

 hillocks themselves as tiny islands intersected by endless miniature 

 channels. The name Thousand Islands is by no means due to charac- 

 teristic American exaggeration : the official survey, made for the 

 Treaty of Ghent gives the number as sixteen hundred and ninety-two, 

 and they extend for forty miles down the river from Kingston to 

 Brockville, in a perpetual succession of beautiful pictures. 



If the islands and islets still remained merely in their original con- 

 dition, as rounded, dome-shaped knolls, clad with pine and maple and 

 Virginia-creeper, rising hump-like in slow slopes from the water's edge, 

 they would still be extremely romantic and picturesque. But they are 

 far more than this. The ceaseless action of the river at their sides, 

 aided by the disintegrating frosts of winter, and the pressure of the 

 ice-packs when the lake " breaks up " in early spring (exactly as if it 

 were an academy for young gentlemen in the Easter holidays), has 

 cut many of their edges into steep little cliffs, fantastically weathered, 

 as granite almost always weathers, into beautiful broken crags and 

 pinnacles. Thus the cliffs often spring sheer from the surface of the 

 water, worn by rain and frost into quaint, jutting shapes, and with rare 

 ferns and flowers and creepers hanging out here and there from their 

 creviced nooks. The summits remain for the most part smooth and 

 polished by the old ice-action ; and the contrast between their bald, 

 round surfaces, almost gray with age and lichens, and the jagged and 

 ruddy outline of the more recent fractures, makes an extremely bold 



