The evening was dark, and the navigation in the tortuous channels sometimes difficult, and might have been dangerous but for the lighthouses.  The steamer crept along in the shadows of the low islands, making frequent landings, and never long out of sight of the illuminations of hotels and cottages.  Possibly by reason of these illuminations this passage has more variety by night than by day.  There was certainly a fascination about this alternating brilliancy and gloom.  On nearly every island there was at least a cottage, and on the larger islands were great hotels, camp-meeting establishments, and houses and tents for the entertainment of thousands of people.  Late as it was in the season, most of the temporary villages and solitary lodges were illuminated; colored lamps were set about the grounds, Chinese lanterns hung in the evergreens, and on half a dozen lines radiating from the belfry of the hotel to the ground, while all the windows blazed and scintillated.  Occasionally as the steamer passed these places of irrepressible gayety rockets were let off, Bengal-lights were burned, and once a cannon attempted to speak the joy of the sojourners.  It was like a continued Fourth of July, and King’s heart burned within him with national pride.  Even Mrs. Farquhar had to admit that it was a fairy spectacle.  During the months of July and August this broad river, with its fantastic islands, is at night simply a highway of glory.  The worldlings and the camp-meeting gatherings vie with each other in the display of colored lights and fireworks.  And such places as the Thousand Islands Park, Wellesley and Wesley parks, and so on, twinkling with lamps and rosy with pyrotechnics, like sections of the sky dropped upon the earth, create in the mind of the steamer pilgrim an indescribable earthly and heavenly excitement.  He does not look upon these displays as advertisements of rival resorts, but as generous contributions to the hilarity of the world.

It is, indeed, a marvelous spectacle, this view for thirty or forty miles, and the simple traveler begins to realize what American enterprise is when it lays itself out for pleasure.  These miles and miles of cottages, hotels, parks, and camp-meetings are the creation of only a few years, and probably can scarcely be paralleled elsewhere in the world for rapidity of growth.  But the strongest impression the traveler has is of the public spirit of these summer sojourners, speculators, and religious enthusiasts.  No man lives to himself alone, or builds his cottage for his selfish gratification.  He makes fantastic carpentry, and paints and decorates and illuminates and shows fireworks, for the genuine sake of display.  One marvels that a person should come here for rest and pleasure in a spirit of such devotion to the public weal, and devote himself night after night for months to illuminating his house and lighting up his island, and tearing open the sky with rockets and shaking the air with powder explosions, in order that the river may be continually en fete.