Mr. King discovered by the register that the Bensons had been here (of all places in the world, he thought this would be the ideal one for a few days with her), and Miss Lamont had a letter from Irene, which she did not offer to read.
“They didn't stay long,” she said, as Mr. King seemed to expect some information out of the letter, “and they have gone on to Bar Harbor. I should like to stop here a week; wouldn't you?”
“Ye-e-s,” trying to recall the mood he was in before he looked at the register; “but—but” (thinking of the words “gone on to Bar Harbor”) “it is a place, after all, that you can see in a short time—go all over it in half a day.”
“But you want to sit about on the rocks, and look at the sea, and dream.”
“I can't dream on an island-not on a small island. It's too cooped up; you get a feeling of being a prisoner.”
“I suppose you wish 'that little isle had wings, and you and I within its shady—'”
“There's one thing I will not stand, Miss Lamont, and that's Moore.”
“Come, let's go to Star Island.”
The party went in the tug Pinafore, which led a restless, fussy life, puffing about among these islands, making the circuit of Appledore at fixed hours, and acting commonly as a ferry. Star Island is smaller than Appledore and more barren, but it has the big hotel (and a different class of guests from those on Appledore), and several monuments of romantic interest. There is the ancient stone church, rebuilt some time in this century; there are some gravestones; there is a monument to Captain John Smith, the only one existing anywhere to that interesting adventurer—a triangular shaft, with a long inscription that could not have been more eulogistic if he had composed it himself. There is something pathetic in this lonely monument when we recall Smith's own touching allusion to this naked rock, on which he probably landed when he once coasted along this part of New England, as being his sole possession in the world at the end of his adventurous career:
“No lot for me but Smith's Isles, which are an array of barren rocks, the most overgrown with shrubs and sharpe whins you can hardly pass them; without either grasse or wood, but three or foure short shrubby old cedars.”
