Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/365

Rh would have delighted the honest souls of Scott and Fergusson. The inner walls showed the polished framework (like a good church-roof) that supported the single layer of planks, unpapered, and otherwise undisfigured; the polished beams and joists overhead bore the weight of the boards that formed at once the ceiling of the drawing-room and the floor of the neat little bedrooms up-stairs. Thus every room had six sides of polished light-brown pine-wood floor, ceiling, and four walls. A few delicate Oriental rugs and native fur-skins lay daintily upon the waxed floor; etchings and sketches hung upon the walls; light and graceful summer-like furniture filled up the rooms; but otherwise all was the clean wooden framework, and delightfully cool and appropriate it looked. Further to carry out the summer effect of the whole, the three reception-rooms on the ground-floor, instead of being jealously partitioned off from one another with the stereotyped formality of urban life, were thrown into one by broad archways, where folding-doors might have been, but were not, so giving an air of roominess and freedom to drawing-room, dining-room, and library alike, which was especially grateful in hot Canadian noontides. With doors and windows flung wide open, and roses and honeysuckles peeping in from the richly festooned pillars of the veranda, can one imagine a more delightful spot in which to spend a cloudless summer?

For, to complete the charm, a veranda ran round the house below, with broad shade and comfortable rocking-chairs, and creepers clambered up the posts around, making, as it were, a rustic frame for the exquisite picture of river and islands that lay beyond. Up-stairs, each bedroom opens out onto a continuous balcony, formed by the roof of the veranda, and running round the whole chalet, Swiss or Norwegian fashion, with a wood-work balustrade, overgrown with lithe sprays of native climbers. The view from the balcony was even finer than that from the platform of rock on which the house stood; it opened up yet wider vistas of the river, and gave a broader prospect over the blue hills of the dim American shore beyond.

I have been thus particular in describing the house at Mossbank, because it may be taken as a fair sample of the delicious little summer cottages in which Americans and Canadians lounge away the sultry months of the transatlantic season. Our hostess, indeed, who combines the artist's eye with the poet's, had been peculiarly happy in her choice of a site: Mossbank stood on, by far, the prettiest point we saw anywhere among those sixteen hundred and ninety-two fairy-like islands; but almost all the cottages we visited were picturesque and appropriate to their use and situation, though none other, perhaps, was quite so graceful in its design, or so dainty in its appointments, as the one in which we were fortunate enough to fix our headquarters. Dozens of such cottages now stud the prettiest parts of the various channels, and it is locally fashionable to run them down as disfiguring and modernizing a beautiful piece of rustic wild scenery. For my own