We camped for the night on one of the most picturesque points. We had two canoes, and to man them four Indians from our Norway House Mission. As the doctor was an enthusiastic fisherman, he decided that we must stop there during the forenoon, while he tried his hand. His first haul was a splendid pike over two feet long. Great was his excitement as his success was assured. Eloquence poured from him; we were flooded with it. The Indians looked on in amazement while he talked of the beauties of the lake and islands, of the water and the sky.
“Wait a moment, doctor,” I said. “I can add to the wild beauty of the place something that will please your artistic eye.”
I requested two fine-looking Indians to launch one of the canoes, and to quietly paddle out to the edge of an island which abruptly rose from the deep, clear waters before us, the top of which had on it a number of splendid spruce and balsams, massed together in natural beauty. I directed the men to drop over the side of the canoe a long fishing line, and then, posing them in striking attitudes in harmony with the place, I asked them to keep perfectly still until every ripple made by their canoe had died away.
I confess I was entranced by the loveliness of the sight. The reflections of the canoe and men, and of the islands and rocks, were as vivid as the actual realities. So clear and transparent was the water, that where it and the air met there seemed but a narrow thread between the two elements. Not a breath of air stirred, not a ripple moved. It was one of those sights which come to us but seldom in a lifetime, where everything is in perfect unison, and God gives us glimpses of what this world, His footstool, must have been before sin entered.
“Doctor,” I said quietly, for my heart was full of the Doxology, “tell me what you think of that vision.”
Standing up, with a great rock beneath his feet, in a voice of suppressed emotion he began. Quietly at first he spoke, but soon he was carried away with his own eloquence:—
“I know well the lochs of my own beloved Scotland, for in many of them I have rowed and fished. I have visited all the famed lakes of Ireland, and have rowed on those in the Lake counties of England. I have travelled far and oft on our great
American lakes, and have seen Tahoe, in all its crystal beauty. I have rowed on the Bosphorus, and travelled in a felucca on the Nile. I have lingered in the gondola on the canals of Venice, and have traced Rob Roy’s canoe in the Sea of Galilee, and on the old historic Jordan. I have seen, in my wanderings in many lands, places of rarest beauty, but the equal of this mine eyes have never gazed upon.”
Never after did I see the lake as we saw it that day.