AMONG THE "THOUSAND ISLANDS." 353 



only I'm afraid the courtesy of the proverbially courteous reader would 

 scarcely survive so severe a strain upon its well-known indulgence. I 

 will hurry on to the boat-house, therefore, which lay at the riverward 

 mouth of the deep ravine, and formed, so to speak, the embarcadere for 

 everywhere ; for the river is, of course, the true highway of the Thou- 

 sand Islands, and the boat is the gig by which one effects commu- 

 nication with the outer world, and pays one's visits to friends and 

 neighbors. 



Indeed, among the islands one lives upon the water. By a certain 

 tacit understanding between the islanders, every resident has a recog- 

 nized right to explore every other resident's petty domain. No obtru- 

 sive notice-boards flaunt before the innocent face of heaven the anti- 

 social and wholly uncalled - for information that trespassers will be 

 prosecuted with the utmost rigor of the law. On the contrary, the 

 usual formula painted on the neat little placard beside the tiny landing- 

 stages assumes the optative rather than the imperative mood : " Parties 

 landing on this island are requested to kindly abstain from damaging 

 the ferns and flowers." The fact is, all the islanders are there as sum- 

 mer visitors only ; each possesses but a tiny realm of his own, often 

 beautifully varied, but always readily exhausted of its native interest ; 

 and the whole charm of the spot would evaporate entirely if proprie- 

 tors insisted with ingrained British churlishness upon their legal right 

 to shut themselves in from landless humanity with the effectual protest 

 of a high brick wall. Accordingly, everybody always lands freely, no 

 man hindering, upon everybody else's private island ; and the day is 

 mostly passed in wandering (afloat) in a delicious, aimless, listless fash- 

 ion down tiny channels between islet and islet, stopping here to pick a 

 rare wild-flower from a cliff on the side, and halting there to explore 

 and climb some jutting rock whose peak promises a wider view over 

 all the surrounding little archipelagoes. 



Many of the islands are still uninhabited, and these are the best of 

 all for botanizing purposes. It is there that you may find the Indian- 

 pipe plant, known also by the still stranger and truer name of corpse- 

 weed ; a beautiful drooping white flower, as pale and soft in its mate- 

 rial as a fungus, of which our hostess said to us prettily : " When I first 

 saw it I was half afraid to touch the uncanny thing. I thought I had 

 found the ghost of a flower." It is, in fact, a lily-like flowering-plant ; 

 a heath by family, which had adopted the habits and mode of life of a 

 fungus, living entirely like a parasite on the decaying foliage beneath 

 the forest-trees, and has therefore lost its green leaves and assimilated 

 in all unessential particulars to the other fungi whose ways it mimics. 

 But I have promised not to be botanical here, so I will refrain from 

 cataloguing all the other wonderful and lovely things to be found on 

 these little island Edens. I will only say in passing that the scarlet 

 columbines, the pinky-white water-lilies, the crimson baneberries, and 

 the snowy anemones combined with the creepers, the ferns, and the 

 vol. xxxi. 23 



