Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/361

Rh the enormous ice-sheets of the Glacial epoch. The granite of the chain is very hard and pure; it is quarried in large masses, indeed, for monumental and building purposes, among these very islands; and so the great river, unable to cut itself as profound a channel as it might otherwise have done in a more yielding rock, has spread itself out in wide pools over a broad and shallow bed, only deep enough for large navigation by river-steamers in two or three well-recognized currents. The main line of the Grand Trunk Railway, in fact, between Kingston and Montreal, traverses this same low, granite range, and exhibits very clearly the conditions precedent for the production of so strange and beautiful a phenomenon as the Thousand Islands. The range consists of numerous crouching, ice-worn mounds or hillocks, shaped exactly like a pig's back—or, to be more respectful, let us say an elephant's, or a basking whale's—while in between them lie deep grooves, or valleys, equally ice-worn, all running parallel and scratched alike, as is necessarily the case with the grooves due to the downward movement of a single great glacier or ice-sheet. Now, the average width of the St. Lawrence under normal circumstances, when it isn't trying, Yankee fashion, to do a big thing, is about a mile or a mile and a half. But when it encounters this belt of ancient ice-worn gneiss, with its accompanying dales, it spreads itself out into a sort of encumbered lake some ten or fifteen miles wide, filling up the grooves and interstices between the rounded humps, but leaving the higher mounds or hillocks themselves as tiny islands intersected by endless miniature channels. The name Thousand Islands is by no means due to characteristic American exaggeration: the official survey, made for the Treaty of Ghent gives the number as sixteen hundred and ninety-two, and they extend for forty miles down the river from Kingston to Brockville, in a perpetual succession of beautiful pictures.

If the islands and islets still remained merely in their original condition, as rounded, dome-shaped knolls, clad with pine and maple and Virginia-creeper, rising hump-like in slow slopes from the water's edge, they would still be extremely romantic and picturesque. But they are far more than this. The ceaseless action of the river at their sides, aided by the disintegrating frosts of winter, and the pressure of the ice-packs when the lake "breaks up" in early spring (exactly as if it were an academy for young gentlemen in the Easter holidays), has cut many of their edges into steep little cliffs, fantastically weathered, as granite almost always weathers, into beautiful broken crags and pinnacles. Thus the cliffs often spring sheer from the surface of the water, worn by rain and frost into quaint, jutting shapes, and with rare ferns and flowers and creepers hanging out here and there from their creviced nooks. The summits remain for the most part smooth and polished by the old ice-action; and the contrast between their bald, round surfaces, almost gray with age and lichens, and the jagged and ruddy outline of the more recent fractures, makes an extremely bold