The fish congregate on these shallows as the water is not deep, and therefore is of a higher temperature, which in the spring months attracts them.
An al fresco lunch on one of these islands at the foot of the Lachine Rapids is a delightful experience on a bright blue sunny day, so happily frequent in the valley of the St. Lawrence. The rushing of the waters and the rustling of the leaves in the trembling silver maples is a sweet chorus of music, ever changing and ever harmonious; the coup d’œil up the rapids is unequaled in interesting beauty, and there is a sense of communing with Nature entirely different in spirit and feeling to that in the solitudes and hearts of the great forests.
One reads everywhere the records of past winters and of winters to come in the ruggedness of the entire landscape, in the hardy look of the timber, in the robustness more than tenderness of the herbage and signs of latent strength conserved to contend with the mighty snows. The present is the more enjoyable by very reason of this knowledge; and the lunch is a royal repast, made so by the royal appetite which the ozone of the woods and waters always produces. We enjoy our lunch of fish chowder, baked beans, strong tea, and such extras as may be in supply, and look upon these magnificent rapids, the “last escapade” of the St. Lawrence in its eternal march to the sea.
I have written of the spring months and their wealth of fishing. But there are the duck, the outardes and the snipe to be shot in the fall, when Nature is donning her winter suit and the days are getting shorter and more sombre, when there is a change that renders one thoughtful and pensive, except in the excitement of the chase.
One ponders over this mighty St. Lawrence, one of the grandest highways of the globe. “Its history, its antecedents are unparalleled. The great lakes are its camping-grounds; here its hosts repose under the sun and stars in areas like that of states and kingdoms, and it is its waters that shake the earth at Niagara. It is a chain of Homeric sublimities from beginning to end. The great cataract is a fit sequel to the great lakes; the spirit that is born in vast and tempestuous Superior takes its full glut of power in that fearful chasm.”
MAIN BUILDING OF THE BUFFALO INTERNATIONAL FAIR ASSOCIATION.
ONE MAN’S WORK FOR CYCLING.
BY HOWARD P. MERRILL.
NO man has ever given such an impetus to any recreative sport as Henry E. Ducker has given to cycling. Almost wholly by individual efforts, he has brought cycling to the foremost position it now holds in America. In his own town he has raised an obscure club to a position of such prominence as to be almost without a rival in the whole country. It was Ducker who inaugurated the tournaments which have without doubt done most toward giving bicycling its present pre-eminence. And it is this same Henry E. Ducker who is now quickening the whole cycling world by his latest and most daring project of an Annual World’s Cycling Tournament, under the auspices of the Buffalo International Fair Association, the first meet of which gathered in the “Queen City” on the shores of Lake Erie, ten thousand wheelmen, besides making the event one of the most notable in the history of cycling. But, though his name be familiar to the whole world of sport, there is no widespread knowledge of the individual man.