26 Recreations of a Sportsman 



half a mile or more, leaving a crater with walls 

 half a mile in height, and rising in the centre 

 two thousand feet, a cone, the top of the old 

 volcano, or another, now r known as Wizard 

 Island. 



How long ago this occurred is not known. 

 There is no " oldest inhabitant " to consult who 

 has any tradition, as the natives avoided the 

 deep abyss. It was discovered only in recent 

 years by white men, filled with water, a lake 

 in a crater, six miles long, four miles wide, and 

 nearly half a mile deep, with walls rising pre- 

 cipitously from it one thousand feet high and 

 still covered with pumice and cinders; not long 

 ago a scene of horror that would have made Pelee 

 unmentionable by comparison; to-day, part of 

 a national park and a fishing ground of the 

 people, its waters of surpassing loveliness. Here 

 a launch has been placed by the Government, 

 and a small rowboat in which the angler may 

 row or drift about and fish, as the strange 

 lake, only to be compared to a tourmaline, or 

 a sapphire, has been stocked with trout. 



But as Walton forgot his angling for echoes, 

 the songs of birds and milkmaids, so can the 

 angler be excused for forgetting the gentle art 

 and its pleasures when floating over one of the 

 earth's greatest craters into which dropped a 

 mountain as large as Mount Washington, twenty 

 square miles of rock disappearing like a jack- 



