Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/368

354 club-mosses, to make as beautiful and varied a carpet as any I have ever beheld anywhere.

Others of the islands have chalets or cottages perched upon their tops, and to these we often rowed through devious channels, trailing a spoon, for black bass, behind, and catching for the most part nothing more valuable than water-lily leaves and Canadian river-weeds. Sometimes a cottage will occupy a single rocky islet, and its grounds will extend to two or three adjacent ones, connected with the home island by rustic bridges, just arched sufficiently to allow a boat to pass easily beneath them. On the American side, the picturesqueness of the scene is occasionally marred by too profuse a display of the national bunting: Canadian loyalty, though sometimes also a trifle obtrusive, seldom indulges in so lavish an ostentation of the British ensign. There are islands, too, where an ill-advised proprietor has had the bad taste to paint up the name of his domain on a big board—"Idlewild," or "Sunnyside," or "River Home"—as though the rock were a railway-station, and the porter were at hand to shout out in incomprehensible syllables, "Change here for Montreal and Chicago."

Few modes of life could be more graceful or humanizing than summer life in these delicious archipelagoes. Here and there, to be sure, as at Thousand Island Park, a whole big island has been bought up by speculators (oddly mixed in the making with camp-meetings and other revivalist religious gatherings), and laid out as a sort of exclusive Bedford Park, where none but approved members of a particular sect may take a cottage. One such little summer village is exclusively Methodist, while another is wholly given over to serious Congregationalism. But in most parts of the group (and it must be remembered that the islands cover, roughly speaking, an area of forty miles by ten or fifteen) each house occupies a little insular kingdom of its own, where the boys and girls can swim, and fish, and play, and flirt, unmolested; where the seniors can lie in hammocks under the trees, and ruminate on politics, philosophy, and the tender affections; where callers can be espied from afar as they approach the shore; and where hospitality on a simple scale is as universal as it is unexacting. Note, also, that big black bass and muskallonge still lurk among the cracks and crannies of the submerged granite, and that on many islands you can sit on the jutting end of a tiny promontory and drop your line for them, plump from the shore, into twenty feet of clear green water.

One last word to the British tourist who, stirred by my natural and indigenous enthusiasm, may perhaps contemplate some day visiting and exploring the Thousand Islands. Don't for a moment suppose that the islands can be adequately seen from the deck of one of the big lake-steamers that ply up and down between Montreal, Kingston, and Toronto. This is the stereotyped British-tourist way of seeing them, and nothing could be flatter or more disappointing. If you take them so, I do not doubt you will come away objurgating me by all your