upon one of them, there is almost nothing to show that the foot of man has ever pressed the thin grass clinging to their rocky surfaces, and keeping its green in the eternal shadow of their pines and cedars.  In the warm morning light they gathered or dispersed before the advancing vessel, which some of them almost touched with the plumage of their evergreens; and where none of them were large, some were so small that it would not have been too bold to figure them as a vaster race of water-birds assembling and separating in her course.  It is curiously affecting to find them so unclaimed yet from the solitude of the vanished wilderness, and scarcely touched even by tradition.  But for the interest left them by the French, these tiny islands have scarcely any associations, and must be enjoyed for their beauty alone.  There is indeed about them a faint light of legend concerning the Canadian rebellion of 1837, for several patriots are said to have taken refuge amidst their lovely multitude; but this episode of modern history is difficult for the imagination to manage, and somehow one does not take sentimentally even to that daughter of a lurking patriot, who long baffled her father’s pursuers by rowing him from one island to another, and supplying him with food by night.

Either the reluctance is from the natural desire that so recent a heroine should be founded on fact, or it is mere perverseness.  Perhaps I ought to say; in justice to her, that it was one of her own sex who refused to be interested in her, and forbade Basil to care for her.  When he had read of her exploit from the guide-book, Isabel asked him if he had noticed that handsome girl in the blue and white striped Garibaldi and Swiss hat, who had come aboard at Kingston.  She pointed her out, and courageously made him admire her beauty, which was of the most bewitching Canadian type.  The young girl was redeemed by her New World birth from the English heaviness; a more delicate bloom lighted her cheeks; a softer grace dwelt in her movement; yet she was round and full, and she was in the perfect flower of youth.  She was not so ethereal in her loveliness as an American girl, but she was not so nervous and had none of the painful fragility of the latter.  Her expression was just a little vacant, it must be owned; but so far as she went she was faultless.  She looked like the most tractable of daughters, and as if she would be the most obedient of wives.  She had a blameless taste in dress, Isabel declared; her costume of blue and white striped Garibaldi and Swiss hat (set upon heavy masses of dark brown hair) being completed by a black silk skirt.  “And you can see,” she added, “that it’s an old skirt made over, and that she’s dressed as cheaply as she is prettily.”  This surprised Basil, who had imputed the young lady’s personal sumptuousness to her dress, and had thought it enormously rich.  When she got off with her chaperone at one of the poorest-looking country landings, she left them in