old settlement, there was no such entrance at this
end; for here the narrow isthmus extended across, connecting with the
mainland. But the same resistless wash of waves that had carried part
of James Towne into the bed of the river, had broken down and submerged
the isthmus too; and our chart showed that there was water enough for
our houseboat to sail over where the colonists used to walk dry-shod.

As to the obstruction we had seen indicated on the chart, that proved
to be the ruins of an old bridge extending out from the mainland along
the submerged isthmus. But the island end of it had been carried away,
and we readily passed through the opening left and got again into Back
River behind the island. Following this for a few hundred yards, we
found ourselves at last beside the bridge we long had sought. Standing
on the upper deck, we could look down stream to the place where our
houseboat had been stopped by the row of pilings. We had practically
circumnavigated the island.

While making Gadabout fast to some convenient pilings, we heard gay
voices and the rumble of wheels on the bridge.

"Look! Look!" cried one of a carriage-full of hatless girls in white
muslins. "There's a houseboat. How in the world did it get in here?"

And we rather wondered ourselves.

CHAPTER V

FANCIES AFLOAT AND RUINS ASHORE

It was midday when we tied Gadabout to the pilings beside the bridge,
and the weather was hot and sultry. So, we deferred until evening the
long walk across the island. But already, sitting under our own awning,
we were in the thick of historic association.

Where our houseboat lay, the early colonists used to find haven for
their vessels, "lashed to one another and moor'd a shore secure from
all Wind and Weather Whatsoever." As they found Back River at this
point so we found it, a stream without banks; instead, on either hand
stretched lonely marshes, jungles of reeds and rushes, now as then more
than man high.

But our thoughts, busy with scenes two or three centuries gone, kept
stumbling over two features of the landscape that were out of keeping
with those old times. Back of us, where an isthmus should be stretching
from island to mainland, was the open water gateway through which we
had come; and in front of us, where there should be nothing but river
and marsh, that modern bridge reached from shore to shore.

Our quickened fancy made short work of such anachronisms. We promptly
raised the subme