The Lake of the Many Islands, long, irregular, spring-fed, lies in a cup of the rolling Ontario farmlands. At the south its waters, passing through a narrow strait, widen into beautiful Blue Bay. At the north they empty, in a series of cascades, into the little river Eau Claire. The town of Les Rapides, its sawmill idle, the ten or twelve log houses closed, stands at the outlet, a deserted village. The eagles soar to and fro over the blue lake; the black bass jump; the dorÉ swim. There are hundreds of little coves and narrow channels—waters forgotten of the foot, where only the hum of insect wings and the rattle of the kingfisher are heard, and where the heron stands sentinel in the marshes and the loons have their mud nests on the shores.

“Crazy as a loon,” that is, of all phrases, the most libelous. For the loon is the most sensible of fowl and possessed of the most distinct personality. No other water bird has so direct and so level a flight. He lays his strong body down along the wind, and goes, like a bullet, straight to his goal, purposeful, unswerving. He has three cries, one a high, maniac laugh, which is, of course, the reason his wits are slandered; then a loud, squealing cry, very like the sound of a pig in distress; and last a long, yearning call, the summons to his mate, perhaps, that he sends out far across the water—a cry that seems the very voice of the wilderness. At twilight, and often in the night, I hear that lonely cry, echoing down the lakes, and the faint, far cry that answers it.

“There will be wind to-night,” the weather-wise say. “Hear the loons making a noise.”

The birds come to the bay back of the island, and swim about there as friendly as puddle ducks. If I go too close, closer than Mr. Gavia Immer thinks safe or respectful, down he goes and stays for some minutes under the water, to emerge far away, and in quite a different quarter from the one in which I expected to see him. No one on earth could ever predict where a loon will come up when he dives. He looks at me austerely, twisting his black head back on his shoulder, until I would swear he had turned it completely round on his white-ringed neck. Then he gives his crazy laugh and disappears again.The loon is protected in Canada. No one may shoot him or molest him. But once in a while one comes across a boat cushion made of a bird skin, its gray and white feathers very soft and thick and attached to the skin so fast that it is well-nigh impossible to pluck them. That is the breast of the loon, the great wild bird of the northern lakes, that the game law has failed to save. When I see one of these skins I hate the vandal who has killed the bird.

The Blakes are my nearest neighbors—not nearest geographically, for the Drapeau farm lies closer to the island; but near by reason of their many friendly acts and kind suggestions. If I am ill or in trouble, it is to Henry and Mary Blake that I shall go for help.

Henry Blake of the keen, ice-blue eye, the caustic tongue and the good heart. There was never anything more scathing than his condemnation of the shiftlessness and, what he considers the general imbecility of his neighbors, and never anything kinder than his willingness to help one of them in a crisis. He will sit for an hour, pencil in hand, laboring to explain to some unsuccessful farmer that wood hauled at next to nothing a cord can only land the hauler in a ditch of debt, and when the hapless one has departed, fully determined to go his own way, to hear Henry spit out the one word, “Fat-head,” as he turns back to his book, is a lesson in the nice choice of epithet.

When it comes to judgment on the manners, the morals, and the methods of their neighbors Henry and Mary Blake sit in the seats of the scornful; but, after all, they are somewhat justified, for they came over from “The States.” Henry, an invalid, bought a rundown island farm, and they have brought it to a good state of cultivation and paid off their mortgage, all in ten years.

But while they are free in their criticisms of the natives, who live from hand to mouth, one notices that the Blakes are always willing to do a good turn, and are usually being asked to do one. Is a house to be built? Henry is called on to plan it. Does a churn spring a leak, or a cow fall ill? Mary goes to the rescue. Does a temperamental seed-drill choke in one of its sixty odd pipes? Henry is sent for to find the seat of the disorder and to apply the remedy.

I also went to him, when deliberating the relative cost of a log house and one of board. Mr. Blake discussed the matter with me in the kindest way, summing up his advice in a sentence, that reached my muddled brain in some such statement as the following:

“It all comes to this. You can get one cedar log, 6×14 for twenty cents. Three goes into twenty-one seven times, so board or log, it would come to the same thing.”

It wasn’t what he said, of course, but I hastened to agree, lest I should be a fat-head too.

Everything on the Blake farm is a pet, from the handsome young Jersey bull, to the tiniest chick, hatched untimely from a nest-egg. They all run toward Mary as soon as she steps from the kitchen door, and as she hurries from house to barn there is always a rabble of small ducks, chickens, calves, and kittens hurrying after her. The other day, when she, Henry, and Jimmy Dodd, their adopted boy, set off for a tour of the lake, a calf swam after them, and tried so earnestly to climb aboard that, perforce, they turned back to shore and tied the foolish creature, lest he should drown himself and them.

Like almost every family in the countryside, the Blakes have adopted a small boy, giving him a home and training and enough to eat, which he never had before in all his forlorn life. They are kindness itself to Jimmie, but Henry regards him with the same foreboding he feels for all other native-born Canadians. He trains him, but in the spirit of “What’s the use?”

“Jimmie here,” he philosophizes, “he can’t seem to learn the first thing; and if he learns it, he can’t retain it. I have taught him to read, but he can’t remember a word; and to write, but he forgets it the next day. Mary even put him through the catechism, and a week later he didn’t know one thing about it. So what are you going to do? I figure out,” he goes on meditatively, “that the people who learn easy are the ones who have been here before. They knew it all in another life, maybe in another language, and all they have to do is just to recall it. But Jimmie here—well, I guess this is his first trip.”

All the while Jimmie of the towhead and the thin, wiry legs and arms is grinning at his critic with a wide, snaggle-toothed smile of great affection.

The Blakes’ house stands on the site of an old log hut, of two rooms and a lean-to shed. In digging the cellar they came upon a walled-in grave—the boards almost rotted away—and in it lay a skeleton. Whose? No one knows, for that grave was dug before the time of anyone now living at Many Islands. Was it some Indian warrior laid there to sleep? Was it a settler of the old pioneer days? No one can tell and no one cares. The Blakes built their comfortable eight-room house over his bones and thought no more about them.

Yesterday Mary and I drove to Queensport, the county seat, fifteen miles away, that I might show myself at the bank and the stores where I am to trade this winter. The start was to be early, and I rose at dawn to have breakfast over, the cabin cleaned, and I myself rowed over to the farm. The woods lay wrapped in a heavy mist. Not a wet leaf stirred. The water looked like mouse-colored crÊpe, and the sun hung like a big, pink balloon in a sky of gray velvet. But before our start the mists had burned away and the day was glorious.

The road lies through a rolling country, all hills, woods, lakes, and glades. Queensport stands at the head of a chain of lakes. It boasts two banks, a high school, churches of all denominations, and a dozen or so shops and houses set in gardens. We dined at the hotel, the Wardrobe House; we transacted our business at the bank, and turned then to our shopping. We went to the harness shop for bread, to the grocer’s for a spool of thread, to the tailor’s to enquire the cost of a telephone. Then I bethought me of my need for some rag carpet. I did not really want that carpet that day, indeed, I had not the money to pay for it. I only thought of inquiring for it while I was in the town.

We were directed to the hardware shop as the most likely place for carpets, and I had no sooner mentioned my errand when a voice came out from behind a stove saying eagerly:

“I know where you can find just what you’re looking for. My old mother has forty yards of as fine a rag carpet as you could wish to see. Say the word and I’ll drive you right out to the farm and show it to you.”

Whereupon a tall, wiry, keen-faced man rose up and dashed out of the shop, returning in an instant with a buggy and a wild-looking black horse. Despite my protests we were bundled into the vehicle and driven at a gallop, through the main street of Queensport, and the driving was as the driving of Jehu the son of Nimshi. Past farms and fields we flew, stopping with a mighty jerk at the door of the mother’s house. There the carpet was rolled forth before me, and there Mary Blake and our energetic friend measured me off twenty yards of it, by a nick in the edge of the kitchen table.

In vain I pleaded and explained my poverty. Our abductor waved me a careless hand.

“Money,” he assured us, “is the last thing that ever worried me. You may pay for the carpet when and where you choose.”

On the way back to town my new friend was properly presented. His name was William Whitfield. Later I heard varied tales of his peculiarities. There was talk of a horse trade, to which Bill Whitfield was a party. The other man came out of the transaction the richer by one more experience, but the poorer as regarded property. It was told me that men said freely that Bill Whitfield drunk could get the better of any two sober men in the Dominion when it came to a bargain, and, as I contemplated my roll of carpet, leaning against the dashboard, I understood why I had been as wax in his hands, and I could only be thankful that it had not occurred to Mr. Whitfield to sell me the whole forty yards.

Back we jogged, Mary and I, along the quiet roads, discussing our bargains and the news of the town. We passed the schoolhouse just as “Teacher” was locking the door for the night. The dusty road was printed all over with the marks of little bare feet, all turning away from the school gate and pointing toward home. The sun was sinking in a flaming sky as we came to the shore of our own lake, where the rowboat lay on the sand awaiting us, a pair of tired travelers, glad to be nearing home.

I would not be a bigot. To each man should belong the right to vaunt the glories of his own beloved camping ground. There may be other places as beautiful as this Lake of the Many Islands, although I cannot believe it. But Many Islands at sunset, its quiet waters all rose and saffron and lavender, under a crescent moon; when the swallows skim the surface and dip their breasts in the ripple, and the blue heron flaps away to his nest in the reeds—Well! I shall see no other spot that so moves my heart with its beauty, until my eyes look out beyond the sunset and behold the land that is very far off.

I drift on past the islands, where the cedars troop down to the water’s edge, and the white birches lean far out over the rocks. The colors fade, the far line of the forests becomes a purple blur, and stars come out and hang in a dove-gray sky. I land at the little dock, safe hidden in the cove; I scramble along the dark trail to the house, while the loons are laughing and calling as they rock on the waves.