352 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



part, though I have known the islands intimately from childhood up- 

 ward, and can remember them when their only inhabitants were minks 

 and musquash, and their staple products blueberries and wild-flowers, 

 I do not think the quaint little cottages and the wooden bungalows 

 are anything other (in most cases) than improvements to the district. 

 And I am rather a Puritan, too, in this matter of wildness. I hate the 

 intrusive foot of civilization. But civilization, as it shows itself among 

 the Thousand Islands, is not intrusive ; it rather heightens than de- 

 tracts from the total impression. By themselves, the islands tend 

 toward sameness ; a graceful chalet, a light wooden toy farm-house, a 

 white, gleaming lighthouse, judiciously planted on a jutting height, 

 and well embowered in spruce-fir and maples, give individuality and 

 distinctiveness to the picture, and supply the landscape with what it 

 otherwise sadly lacks points de repere in the tangled maze of wood 

 and water. Every view is all the better for an occasional landmark ; 

 the wildest nature is somewhat improved by a stray token of man's 

 occupancy and the possibility of intercourse with the mass of hu- 

 manity. 



For, except the cottages, the islands have been mostly left by the 

 common good taste of their owners and occupiers in their native wild- 

 ness of rock and foliage. No foolish attempts have anywhere been 

 made at the outrage known as landscape-gardening : the granite crags 

 and the festoons of wild-vine or Yirginia-creeper have been wisely re- 

 tained in God's own handywork. The grounds of Mossbank, in par- 

 ticular, were especially charming. In front of the house the bare 

 platform of rounded granite gave place here and there to irregular 

 patches of shallow greensward, in which a few bright flowers grew as 

 if naturally, while native shrubs found a firm foothold in the deep 

 dikes weathered at joints in the solid rock. All round stretched rich 

 Canadian woodland, carpeted with undergrowth of blueberry and 

 poison-ivy. From the edge of the cliff, which toppled over sheer I 

 know not how many hundred feet into the river below, one looked 

 down into pellucid depths of limpid water, where even from so great 

 a height the bass and pickerel might be distinctly descried waving 

 their restless fins against the black background of rock at the bottom. 

 Everywhere around lay delicious spots where one might fling one's self 

 at one's ease on the smooth gneiss, almost as polished as if by a lapi- 

 dary's wheel, and pick sweet flowers from the crannies between flow- 

 ers of that beautiful exotic Canadian woodland type, so different from 

 our weedy European pattern. 



On one side, a little back of the chalet (which could practically be 

 approached by water only), lay a deep ravine whose bottom was filled 

 with rich peat-mold, the home of innumerable exquisite ferns, a para- 

 dise for the botanist, pregnant with hints as to Nature's ways among 

 the flowers and insects. I could linger here for hours discoursing of 

 the strange and lovely plants that grew profusely in that shaded dell, 



