AMONG THE "THOUSAND ISLANDS." 351 



would have delighted the honest souls of Scott and Fergusson. The 

 inner walls showed the polished framework (like a good church-roof) 

 that supported the single layer of planks, unpapered, and otherwise 

 undisfigured ; the polished beams and joists overhead bore the weight 

 of the boards that formed at once the ceiling of the drawing-room and 

 the floor of the neat little bedrooms up-stairs. Thus every room had 

 six sides of polished light-brown pine-wood floor, ceiling, and four 

 walls. A few delicate Oriental rugs and native fur-skins lay daintily 

 upon the waxed floor ; etchings and sketches hung upon the walls ; 

 light and graceful summer-like furniture filled up the rooms ; but other- 

 wise all was the clean wooden framework, and delightfully cool and 

 appropriate it looked. Further to carry out the summer effect of the 

 whole, the three reception-rooms on the ground-floor, instead of being 

 jealously partitioned off from one another with the stereotyped for- 

 mality of urban life, were thrown into one by broad archways, where 

 folding-doors might have been, but were not, so giving an air of room- 

 iness and freedom to drawing-room, dining-room, and library alike, 

 which was especially grateful in hot Canadian noontides. With doors 

 and windows flung wide open, and roses and honeysuckles peeping in 

 from the richly festooned pillars of the veranda, can one imagine a 

 more delightful spot in which to spend a cloudless summer ? 



For, to complete the charm, a veranda ran round the house below, 

 with broad shade and comfortable rocking-chairs, and creepers clam- 

 bered up the posts around, making, as it were, a rustic frame for the 

 exquisite picture of river and islands that lay beyond. Up-stairs, 

 each bedroom opens out onto a continuous balcony, formed by the roof 

 of the veranda, and running round the whole chalet, Swiss or Norwe- 

 gian fashion, with a wood- work balustrade, overgrown with lithe sprays 

 of native climbers. The view from the balcony was even finer than 

 that from the platform of rock on which the house stood ; it opened 

 up yet wider vistas of the river, and gave a broader prospect over the 

 blue hills of the dim American shore beyond. 



I have been thus particular in describing the house at Mossbank, 

 because it may be taken as a fair sample of the delicious little summer 

 cottages in which Americans and Canadians lounge away the sultry 

 months of the transatlantic season. Our hostess, indeed, who com- 

 bines the artist's eye with the poet's, had been peculiarly happy in her 

 choice of a site : Mossbank stood on, by far, the prettiest point we 

 saw anywhere among those sixteen hundred and ninety-two fairy-like 

 islands ; but almost all the cottages we visited were picturesque and 

 appropriate to their use and situation, though none other, perhaps, was 

 quite so graceful in its design, or so dainty in its appointments, as the 

 one in which we were fortunate enough to fix our headquarters. 

 Dozens of such cottages now stud the prettiest parts of the various 

 channels, and it is locally fashionable to run them down as disfiguring 

 and modernizing a beautiful piece of rustic wild scenery. For my own 



