Among the Thousand Islands. 575 



dria Bay — fortunately still beautiful — does Nature reign in silent 

 majesty, for the constant flutter and bustle of the life and gayety of a 

 summer resort have superseded her. But although Alexandria Bay 

 is in this continual tumult of life, for some fortunate and almost 

 unaccountable reason, the Thousand Islands are not in the least 

 tinctured with the blase air of an ordinary watering-place, nor are 

 they likely to become so. There are hundreds — thousands of places, 

 rugged and solitary, among which a boat can glide, while its occu- 

 pant lies gloriously indolent, doing nothing, but reveling in the 

 realization of life ; little bays, almost land-locked, where the resin- 

 ■ous odors of hemlock and pine fill the nostrils, and the whispers of 

 nature's unseen life serves but to make the solitude more perceptible. 

 Sometimes the vociferous cawing of crows sounds through the hol- 



low woods, or a solitary eagle lifts from his perch on the top of a 

 stark and dead pine and sails majestically across the blue arch of 

 the sky. Such scenes occur in a beautiful sheet of water called the 

 Lake of the Isle, lying placidly and balmily in the lap of the piney 

 hills of Wells Island, reflecting their rugged crests in its glassy sur- 

 face, dotted here and there by tiny islands. 



In the stillest bays are spots that seem to lie in a Rip Van Win- 

 kle sleep, where one would scarcely be surprised to see an Indian 



