343 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and effective element in the total picture. The islets are also of every 

 imaginable shape, size, and grouping some of them big enough to 

 hold two or three farms, and others of them rising solitary from mid- 

 stream, crowned by a single waving stem of Canadian cedar. Here 

 is one, for example, a mere bare pinnacle of moldering rock ; and 

 here is another, a craggy little island, yet covered with endless variety 

 of timber, whose drooping foliage hangs over the bank and reflects 

 itself placidly in the silvery mirror below. Thus cluster after cluster 

 passes before one's eyes, all fairy-like, green, and romantic, but all as 

 infinitely varied in shape and contour as intricate intermixture of rock 

 and vegetation, and land and water, can possibly make them. 



I must give the reader due warning, however, that on this ground 

 I am perhaps a trifle enthusiastic. To say the truth, if I may for once 

 be frankly personal, I speak with the pardonable partiality of a native. 

 I am, indeed, an aboriginal of this very district, born at Kingston, the 

 threshold of the St. Lawrence, and " raised " (as we say beyond the 

 Atlantic) on the biggest and longest of the Thousand Islands. Hence, 

 something of the glamour of childhood surrounds the region still in 

 my eyes : sweeter flowers blow there than anywhere else on this pro- 

 saic planet ; bigger fish lurk among the crevices, bluer birds flit be- 

 tween the honeysuckles, and livelier squirrels gambol upon the hickory- 

 trees, than in any other corner of this oblate spheroid. I see the 

 orange lilies and the lady's-slippers still, by the reflected light of ten- 

 year-old memories. So the cautious reader will perhaps do well to 

 take a liberal discount of twenty per cent off all my adjectives, to 

 submit my eulogistic verbs to a strict ad-valorem drawback, and to 

 accept the remainder as probably representing an unprejudiced view 

 of the situation. I am not, I will admit, a patriotic Canadian in so 

 small a community patriotism runs perilously near to provincialism 

 but I must allow that a warm corner still exists in my heart for the 

 rocks and reaches of the Thousand Islands. 



The Princess Louise steams down the Canadian Channel one of 

 the two chief navigable currents past Wolfe Island, where I spent a 

 rustic boyhood with the raccoons and the sunfish, and on through end- 

 less groups of other wooded islets, with cedars sweeping low to the 

 water's edge, till, after a couple of hours aboard, two white wooden 

 lighthouses, guarding the entrance to the little harbor, announce our 

 approach to Gananoque. A "creek," or minor river (pronounce it 

 "crick" if you wish to be thoroughly transatlantic), here joins issue 

 with the great St. Lawrence, and of course on its way indulges in some 

 local waterfalls, once pretty, but now made to do duty, alas ! with 

 American utilitarianism, in turning the saw-mills which are the raison 

 d'etre of the flourishing small village. I will not describe Gananoque 

 itself Canadian villages are best left to the imagination of the chari- 

 table reader ; I will only say that its natural situation is absolutely 

 charming, and its bay and outlook " as beautiful as they make them." 



