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 submerged isthmus, tying the island to the mainland once more.  Then we attacked the bridge; and, as the pilings to which our boat was fastened did not have any connection with that structure, we felt no misgivings as the troublesome modernism faded away.

The bridge disposed of, we bethought us that the road with which it had connected was also a latter-day feature.  To be sure, our maps showed us that in colonial times too a road had crossed the island, and along much the same lines; but it had come out a little farther down Back River, at the point already referred to as “Friggett Landing.”

To put the roadway right, then, we had first to locate the site of the old landing.  And in this important matter what painstaking archeologists we were!  Not by guesswork, but by a long string, did we locate “Friggett Landing.”  After reading all that our authorities had to say on the subject (and understanding part of it), we sent our man down stream in a rowboat, confident that he would find the landing at the end of the measured string.  When the string ran out, the rowboat was opposite a point on the marshy edge of the island about one hundred feet below the present-day road.

The correctness of our work was at once evident.  All the indications pointed to that; for the place showed not the slightest sign of ever having been used as a landing-place—­which is just what you would expect after the lapse of two or three centuries.

After that, it was but the work of a moment to crook the end of the modern road, where it approached the river through a bit of elevated woodland (the only piece of solid land anywhere near us), and so make it come out, like the road of old, at the “landing.”  Now, our man held aloft a stick with the houseboat’s burgee on it, and a photograph was taken that we might not forget where our diverted road came out and where to go to meet the “friggetts” that might be coming in almost any time.

Our trifling bits of restoration made all satisfactory:  an isthmus more, a bridge less, a crook in the end of a road—­and the scene went back, as our thoughts went back, to those old James Towne days.  To be sure, the village itself was still clear across the island on the “Maine River” side, and we could not catch a glimpse of the colonists in their little streets nor even of the English colours flying over the fort.