"Look! Look!" cried one of a carriage-full of hatless girls in white muslins. "There's a houseboat. How in the world did it get in here?"
And we rather wondered ourselves.
CHAPTER V
FANCIES AFLOAT AND RUINS ASHORE
It was midday when we tied Gadabout to the pilings beside the bridge, and the weather was hot and sultry. So, we deferred until evening the long walk across the island. But already, sitting under our own awning, we were in the thick of historic association.
Where our houseboat lay, the early colonists used to find haven for their vessels, "lashed to one another and moor'd a shore secure from all Wind and Weather Whatsoever." As they found Back River at this point so we found it, a stream without banks; instead, on either hand stretched lonely marshes, jungles of reeds and rushes, now as then more than man high.
But our thoughts, busy with scenes two or three centuries gone, kept stumbling over two features of the landscape that were out of keeping with those old times. Back of us, where an isthmus should be stretching from island to mainland, was the open water gateway through which we had come; and in front of us, where there should be nothing but river and marsh, that modern bridge reached from shore to shore.
Our quickened fancy made short work of such anachronisms. We promptly raised the submerged isthmus, tying the island to the mainland once more. Then we attacked the bridge; and, as the pilings to which our boat was fastened did not have any connection with that structure, we felt no misgivings as the troublesome modernism faded away.
The bridge disposed of, we bethought us that the road with which it had connected was also a latter-day feature. To be sure, our maps showed us that in colonial times too a road had crossed the island, and along much the same lines; but it had come out a little farther down Back River, at the point already referred to as "Friggett Landing."
To put the roadway right, then, we had first to locate the site of the old landing. And in this important matter what painstaking archeologists we were! Not by guesswork, but by a long string, did we locate "Friggett Landing." After reading all that our authorities had to say on the subject (and understanding part of it), we sent our man down stream in a rowboat, confident that he would find the landing at the end of the measured string. When the string ran out, the rowboat was opposite a point on the marshy edge of the island about one hundred feet below the present-day road.
The correctness of our work was at once evident. All the indications pointed to that; for the place showed not the slightest sign of ever having been used as a landing-place—which is just what you would expect after the lapse of two or three centuries.