Mrs. Farquhar turned away, and King saw that her eyes were full of tears.  She stood a moment looking away over the sparkling water to the soft islands on the hazy horizon.  Was she thinking of her own marriage?  Death had years ago dissolved it, and were these tears, not those of mourning, but for the great experience possible in life, so seldom realized, missed forever?  Before King could frame, in the tumult of his own thoughts, any reply, she turned towards him again, with her usual smile, half of badinage and half of tenderness, and said: 

“Come, this is enough of tragedy for one day; let us go on the Island Wanderer, with the other excursionists, among the isles of the blest.”

The little steamer had already its load, and presently was under way, puffing and coughing, on its usual afternoon trip among the islands.  The passengers were silent, and appeared to take the matter seriously—­a sort of linen-duster congregation, of the class who figure in the homely dialect poems of the Northern bards, Mrs. Farquhar said.  They were chiefly interested in knowing the names of the successful people who had built these fantastic dwellings, and who lived on illuminations.  Their curiosity was easily gratified, for in most cases the owners had painted their names, and sometimes their places of residence, in staring white letters on conspicuous rocks.  There was also exhibited, for the benefit of invalids, by means of the same white paint, here and there the name of a medicine that is a household word in this patent-right generation.  So the little steamer sailed, comforted by these remedies, through the strait of Safe Nervine, round the bluff of Safe Tonic, into the open bay of Safe Liver Cure.  It was a healing voyage, and one in which enterprise was so allied with beauty that no utilitarian philosopher could raise a question as to the market value of the latter.

The voyage continued as far as Gananoque, in Canada, where the passengers went ashore, and wandered about in a disconsolate way to see nothing.  King said, however, that he was more interested in the place than in any other he had seen, because there was nothing interesting in it; it was absolutely without character, or a single peculiarity either of Canada or of the United States.  Indeed, this north shore seemed to all the party rather bleak even in summertime, and the quality of the sunshine thin.

It was, of course, a delightful sail, abounding in charming views, up “lost channels,” through vistas of gleaming water overdrooped by tender foliage, and now and then great stretches of sea, and always islands, islands.

“Too many islands too much alike,” at length exclaimed Mrs. Farquhar, “and too many tasteless cottages and temporary camping structures.”

The performance is, indeed, better than the prospectus.  For there are not merely the poetical Thousand Islands; by actual count there are sixteen hundred and ninety-two.  The artist and Miss Lamont were trying to sing a fine song they discovered in the Traveler’s Guide, inspired perhaps by that sentimental ditty, “The Isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece,” beginning,