3 54 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



club-mosses, to make as beautiful and varied a carpet as any I have 

 ever beheld anywhere. 



Others of the islands have chalets or cottages perched upon their 

 tops, and to these we often rowed through devious channels, trailing a 

 spoon, for black bass, behind, and catching for the most part nothing 

 more valuable than water-lily leaves and Canadian river-weeds. Some- 

 times a cottage will occupy a single rocky islet, and its grounds will 

 extend to two or three adjacent ones, connected with the home island 

 by rustic bridges, just arched sufficiently to allow a boat to pass easily 

 beneath them. On the American side, the picturesqueness of the scene 

 is occasionally marred by too profuse a display of the national bunt- 

 ing : Canadian loyalty, though sometimes also a trifle obtrusive, seldom 

 indulges in so lavish an ostentation of the British ensign. There are 

 islands, too, where an ill-advised proprietor has had the bad taste to 

 paint up the name of his domain on a big board "Idlewild," or 

 "Sunnyside," or "River Home" as though the rock were a railway- 

 station, and the porter were at hand to shout out in incomprehensible 

 syllables, " Change here for Montreal and Chicago." 



Few modes of life could be more graceful or humanizing than sum- 

 mer life in these delicious archipelagoes. Here and there, to be sure, 

 as at Thousand Island Park, a whole big island has been bought up by 

 speculators (oddly mixed in the making with camp-meetings and other 

 revivalist religious gatherings), and laid out as a sort of exclusive Bed- 

 ford Park, where none but approved members of a particular sect may 

 take a cottage. One such little summer village is exclusively Meth- 

 odist, while another is wholly given over to serious Congregationalism. 

 But in most parts of the group (and it must be remembered that the 

 islands cover, roughly speaking, an area of forty miles by ten or fifteen) 

 each house occupies a little insular kingdom of its own, where the boys 

 and girls can swim, and fish, and play, and flirt, unmolested ; where 

 the seniors can lie in hammocks under the trees, and ruminate on poli- 

 tics, philosophy, and the tender affections ; where callers can be espied 

 from afar as they approach the shore ; and where hospitality on a sim- 

 ple scale is as universal as it is unexacting. Note, also, that big black 

 bass and muskallonge still lurk among the cracks and crannies of the 

 submerged granite, and that on many islands you can sit on the jutting 

 end of a tiny promontory and drop your line for them, plump from the 

 shore, into twenty feet of clear green water. 



One last word to the British tourist who, stirred by my natural and 

 indigenous enthusiasm, may perhaps contemplate some day visiting and 

 exploring the Thousand Islands. Don't for a moment suppose that the 

 islands can be adequately seen from .the deck of one of the big lake- 

 steamers that ply up and down between Montreal, Kingston, and To- 

 ronto. This is the stereotyped British-tourist way of seeing them, and 

 nothing could be flatter or more disappointing. If you take them so, 

 I do not doubt you will come away objurgating me by all your domes- 



