Ranges, ragged and lofty, their bare and rocky summits glistening in the sunlight, while nearer still the hills rise, sometimes with steep and ragged acclivity, and sometimes gently from the shore.  Here and there a valley winds away among the highlands, along which the mountain streams come bounding down rapids, or moving in deep and sluggish, but pure currents, towards the lake.  The rugged and sublime, with the placid and beautiful, in natural scenery, are magnificently mingled in the surroundings of this little sheet of water.

CHAPTER IV.

THE DOCTOR’S STORY—­A SLIPPERY FISH—­A LAWSUIT AND A COMPROMISE.

There seems to be a law, or rather a habit pertaining to forest life, into which every one falls, while upon excursions such as ours.  Stories occupy the place of books, and tales of the marvellous furnish a substitute for the evening papers.  Not that there should be any set rule or system, in regard to the ordering of the matter, but a sort of spontaneous movement, an implied understanding, growing out of the necessities of the position of isolation occupied by those who are away from the resources of civilization.  The doctor had a genius for story telling, or rather a genius for invention, which required only a moderate development of the organ of credulity on the part of his hearers, to render him unrivalled.  There was an appearance of frank earnestness about his manner of relating his adventures, which, however improbable or even impossible as matter of fact they might be, commanded, for the moment, absolute credence.

“They’ve a curious fish in the St. Lawrence,” said the doctor, as he knocked the ashes from his meerschaum, and refilled it, “known among the fishermen of that river as the lawyer.  I have never seen it among any other of the waters of this country, and never there but once.  It never bites at a hook, and is taken only by gill-nets, or the seine.  Everybody,” he continued, “has visited the Thousand Islands, or if everybody has not, he had better go there at once.  He will find them, in the heat of summer, not only the coolest and most healthful retreat, and the pleasantest scenery that the eye ever rested upon, always excepting these beautiful lakes, but the best river fishing I know of on this continent.  He will not, to be sure, take the speckled trout that we find in this region, but he will be among the black bass, the pickerel, muscalunge, and striped bass, in the greatest abundance, and ready to answer promptly any reasonable demand which he may make upon them.  Think of reeling in a twenty-pound pickerel, or a forty-pound muscalunge, on a line three hundred feet in length, playing him for half an hour, and landing him safely in your boat at last!  There’s excitement for you worth talking about.

“I stopped over night at Cape Vincent, last summer, on my way to ’the Thousand Islands,’ on a fishing excursion of a week.  I was acquainted with an old fisherman of that place, and agreed to go out with him the next morning, to see what luck he had with the fish.  I don’t think much of that kind of fishing, though it is well enough for those who make a business of it, for the gill-net works, as the old man said, while the fisherman sleeps, and all he gets in that way is clear gain.