YHE SAIMA SER. ) 
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 J 
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 
sven by me, in sailing from Christiansand to Christiana : 
‘T 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 uvder 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 wis 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 
