Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/366

352 part, though I have known the islands intimately from childhood upward, and can remember them when their only inhabitants were minks and musquash, and their staple products blueberries and wild-flowers, I do not think the quaint little cottages and the wooden bungalows are anything other (in most cases) than improvements to the district. And I am rather a Puritan, too, in this matter of wildness. I hate the intrusive foot of civilization. But civilization, as it shows itself among the Thousand Islands, is not intrusive; it rather heightens than detracts from the total impression. By themselves, the islands tend toward sameness; a graceful chalet, a light wooden toy farm-house, a white, gleaming lighthouse, judiciously planted on a jutting height, and well embowered in spruce-fir and maples, give individuality and distinctiveness to the picture, and supply the landscape with what it otherwise sadly lacks—points de repère—in the tangled maze of wood and water. Every view is all the better for an occasional landmark; the wildest nature is somewhat improved by a stray token of man's occupancy and the possibility of intercourse with the mass of humanity.

For, except the cottages, the islands have been mostly left by the common good taste of their owners and occupiers in their native wildness of rock and foliage. No foolish attempts have anywhere been made at the outrage known as landscape-gardening: the granite crags and the festoons of wild-vine or Yirginia-creeper have been wisely retained in God's own handywork. The grounds of Mossbank, in particular, were especially charming. In front of the house the bare platform of rounded granite gave place here and there to irregular patches of shallow greensward, in which a few bright flowers grew as if naturally, while native shrubs found a firm foothold in the deep dikes weathered at joints in the solid rock. All round stretched rich Canadian woodland, carpeted with undergrowth of blueberry and poison-ivy. From the edge of the cliff, which toppled over sheer I know not how many hundred feet into the river below, one looked down into pellucid depths of limpid water, where even from so great a height the bass and pickerel might be distinctly descried waving their restless fins against the black background of rock at the bottom. Everywhere around lay delicious spots where one might fling one's self at one's ease on the smooth gneiss, almost as polished as if by a lapidary's wheel, and pick sweet flowers from the crannies between flowers of that beautiful exotic Canadian woodland type, so different from our weedy European pattern.

On one side, a little back of the chalet (which could practically be approached by water only), lay a deep ravine whose bottom was filled with rich peat-mold, the home of innumerable exquisite ferns, a paradise for the botanist, pregnant with hints as to Nature's ways among the flowers and insects. I could linger here for hours discoursing of the strange and lovely plants that grew profusely in that shaded dell,