ossible. They were
English or Irish or Scotch, with the healthful bloom of the Old World
still upon their faces, or if Canadians they looked not less hearty;
so that one must wonder if the line between the Dominion and the United
States did not also sharply separate good digestion and dyspepsia. 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 tra