Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/367

Rh only I'm afraid the courtesy of the proverbially courteous reader would scarcely survive so severe a strain upon its well-known indulgence. I will hurry on to the boat-house, therefore, which lay at the riverward mouth of the deep ravine, and formed, so to speak, the embarcadère for everywhere; for the river is, of course, the true highway of the Thousand Islands, and the boat is the gig by which one effects communication with the outer world, and pays one's visits to friends and neighbors.

Indeed, among the islands one lives upon the water. By a certain tacit understanding between the islanders, every resident has a recognized right to explore every other resident's petty domain. No obtrusive notice-boards flaunt before the innocent face of heaven the anti-social and wholly uncalled-for information that trespassers will be prosecuted with the utmost rigor of the law. On the contrary, the usual formula painted on the neat little placard beside the tiny landing-stages assumes the optative rather than the imperative mood: "Parties landing on this island are requested to kindly abstain from damaging the ferns and flowers." The fact is, all the islanders are there as summer visitors only; each possesses but a tiny realm of his own, often beautifully varied, but always readily exhausted of its native interest; and the whole charm of the spot would evaporate entirely if proprietors insisted with ingrained British churlishness upon their legal right to shut themselves in from landless humanity with the effectual protest of a high brick wall. Accordingly, everybody always lands freely, no man hindering, upon everybody else's private island; and the day is mostly passed in wandering (afloat) in a delicious, aimless, listless fashion down tiny channels between islet and islet, stopping here to pick a rare wild-flower from a cliff on the side, and halting there to explore and climb some jutting rock whose peak promises a wider view over all the surrounding little archipelagoes.

Many of the islands are still uninhabited, and these are the best of all for botanizing purposes. It is there that you may find the Indian-pipe plant, known also by the still stranger and truer name of corpse-weed; a beautiful drooping white flower, as pale and soft in its material as a fungus, of which our hostess said to us prettily: "When I first saw it I was half afraid to touch the uncanny thing. I thought I had found the ghost of a flower." It is, in fact, a lily-like flowering-plant; a heath by family, which had adopted the habits and mode of life of a fungus, living entirely like a parasite on the decaying foliage beneath the forest-trees, and has therefore lost its green leaves and assimilated in all unessential particulars to the other fungi whose ways it mimics. But I have promised not to be botanical here, so I will refrain from cataloguing all the other wonderful and lovely things to be found on these little island Edens. I will only say in passing that the scarlet columbines, the pinky-white water-lilies, the crimson baneberries, and the snowy anemones combined with the creepers, the ferns, and the