sia. These provincials
had not our regularity of features, nor the best of them our careworn
sensibility of expression; but neither had they our complexions of adobe;
and even Isabel was forced to allow that the men were, on the whole,
better dressed than the same number of average Americans would have been
in a city of that size and remoteness. The stevedores who were putting
the freight aboard were men of leisure; they joked in a kindly way with
the orange-women and the old women picking up chips on the pier; and our
land of hurry seemed beyond the ocean rather than beyond the lake.

Kingston has romantic memories of being Fort Frontenac two hundred years
ago; of Count Frontenac's splendid advent among the Indians; of the brave
La Salle, who turned its wooden walls to stone; of wars with the savages
and then with the New York colonists, whom the French and their allies
harried from this point; of the destruction of La Salle's fort in the Old
French War; and of final surrender a few years later to the English. It
is as picturesque as it is historical. All about the city, the shores are
beautifully wooded, and there are many lovely islands,--the first indeed
of those Thousand Islands with which the head of the St. Lawrence is
filled, and among which the steamer was presently threading her way. They
are still as charming and still almost as wild as when, in 1673,
Frontenac's flotilla of canoes passed through their labyrinth and issued
upon the lake. Save for a light-house upon one of them, there is almost
nothing to show that the foot of man has ever pressed the thin grass
clinging to their rocky surfaces, and keeping its green in the eternal
shadow of their pines and cedars. In the warm morning light they gathered
or dispersed before the advancing vessel, which some of them almost
touched with the plumage of their evergreens; and where none of them were
large, some were so small that it would not have been too bold to figure
them as a vaster race of water-birds assembling and separating in her
course. It is curiously affecting to find them so unclaimed yet from the
solitude of the vanished wilderness, and scarcely touched even by
tradition. But for the interest left them by the French, these tiny
islands have scarcely any associations, and must be enjoyed for their
beauty alone. There is indeed about them a faint light of legend
concerning the Canadian rebellion of 1837, for several patriots are said
to have taken refuge