Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/362

343 and effective element in the total picture. The islets are also of every imaginable shape, size, and grouping some of them big enough to hold two or three farms, and others of them rising solitary from mid-stream, crowned by a single waving stem of Canadian cedar. Here is one, for example, a mere bare pinnacle of moldering rock; and here is another, a craggy little island, yet covered with endless variety of timber, whose drooping foliage hangs over the bank and reflects itself placidly in the silvery mirror below. Thus cluster after cluster passes before one's eyes, all fairy-like, green, and romantic, but all as infinitely varied in shape and contour as intricate intermixture of rock and vegetation, and land and water, can possibly make them.

I must give the reader due warning, however, that on this ground I am perhaps a trifle enthusiastic. To say the truth, if I may for once be frankly personal, I speak with the pardonable partiality of a native. I am, indeed, an aboriginal of this very district, born at Kingston, the threshold of the St. Lawrence, and "raised" (as we say beyond the Atlantic) on the biggest and longest of the Thousand Islands. Hence, something of the glamour of childhood surrounds the region still in my eyes: sweeter flowers blow there than anywhere else on this prosaic planet; bigger fish lurk among the crevices, bluer birds flit between the honeysuckles, and livelier squirrels gambol upon the hickory-trees, than in any other corner of this oblate spheroid. I see the orange lilies and the lady's-slippers still, by the reflected light of ten-year-old memories. So the cautious reader will perhaps do well to take a liberal discount of twenty per cent off all my adjectives, to submit my eulogistic verbs to a strict ad-valorem drawback, and to accept the remainder as probably representing an unprejudiced view of the situation. I am not, I will admit, a patriotic Canadian—in so small a community patriotism runs perilously near to provincialism—but I must allow that a warm corner still exists in my heart for the rocks and reaches of the Thousand Islands.

The Princess Louise steams down the Canadian Channel—one of the two chief navigable currents—past Wolfe Island, where I spent a rustic boyhood with the raccoons and the sunfish, and on through endless groups of other wooded islets, with cedars sweeping low to the water's edge, till, after a couple of hours aboard, two white wooden lighthouses, guarding the entrance to the little harbor, announce our approach to Gananoque. A "creek," or minor river (pronounce it "crick" if you wish to be thoroughly transatlantic), here joins issue with the great St. Lawrence, and of course on its way indulges in some local waterfalls, once pretty, but now made to do duty, alas! with American utilitarianism, in turning the saw-mills which are the raison d'etre of the flourishing small village. I will not describe Gananoque itself—Canadian villages are best left to the imagination of the charitable reader; I will only say that its natural situation is absolutely charming, and its bay and outlook "as beautiful as they make them."