THE SAIMA SEE. 9 



When I passed through it we met at one of the locks a 

 large Imperial yacht, in which the Grand Duke Alexis 

 had been making the tour of the lakes. I thought, as I 

 advanced further and further on my voyage, that were 

 the characteristics of the Saima Lake and the Saima See 

 better known, hundreds of British and American tourists 

 and owners of yachts would do the same. 



In Finland one hears as often, I think, of the Saima 

 See as the Saima Lake. The former designation I under- 

 stand to be applied to the whole body of connected lakes 

 and lakelets. 



The lower part of this sea, to which the designation 

 Saima Lake appears to me to be confined, is studded thick 

 with islands of all shapes and sizes, from that of a small 

 dining-table to an area of miles ; all of them wooded to the 

 water-edge. I have elsewhere had occasion to tell of the 

 islands clustering around the Norwegian coast, as these were 

 seen by me, in sailing fiom Christiansand to Christiana : 



' I was reminded of a voyage through the thousand 

 isles of Lake Ontario ; but the scene was different. Here 

 the islands are rocks, but not rocks rough and rugged 

 rocks of granite plained down and smoothed by glacial 

 action, more like clean and white and sparkling banks 

 of mud than are rocks on a sea-girt shore. It required 

 no effort, and but little fancy, to picture them as an ocean- 

 bed rising above the sea, when, according to the Hebrew 

 cosmogony, God said, " Let the waters under the heavens 

 be gathered together, and let the dry land appear." And 

 again, "Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding 

 seed, and the fruit-tree yielding fruit after his kind : and 

 it was so." 



'There, were the bare rounded granite rocks, without 

 a blade of vegetation ; there, were others with only a 

 lichen or a moss, or a grassy or flowery green spot. The 

 former was on the dry rock, the latter on any crack or 

 hollowed basin ; and there, where there was a wider rent, 

 or a cup -like basin containing a handful of earth, a sapling 



