Page:The New Penelope.djvu/86

80 A CURIOUS INTERVIEW.

ANCOUVER'S Island furnishes some of the finest scenery on the Pacific Coast; not grandest, perhaps, but quietly charming. Its shores are indented every here and there with the loveliest of bays and sounds, forming the most exquisite little harbors to be found anywhere in the world. The climate of the Island, especially its summer climate, is delightful. Such bright, bracing airs as come from the sea on one side, and from the snow-capped mountains of the mainland on the other, are seldom met with on either hemisphere. Given a July day, a pleasant companion or two in a crank little boat, whose oars we use to make silvery interludes in our talk, and I should not envy your sailor on the Bosphorus.

On such a July day as I am hinting at, our party had idled away the morning, splashing our way indolently through the blue waters of Nittinat Sound, the mountains towering behind us, the open sea not far off; but all around us a shore so emerald green and touched with bits of color, so gracefully, picturesquely wild, that not, in all its unrestraint, was there an atom of savagery to be subdued in the interest of pure beauty. It was a wilderness not wild, a solitude not solitary; but rather populous with happy fancies, born of all harmonious influences of earth, air and water; of sunlight, shadow, color and fragrance.

sang Charlie, bursting with poetry. The next moment "Hallo! boat ahoy!" and into the scene in which just now we had been the only life, slipped from some hidden inlet, an Indian canoe.