in it." These things had an effect of intoxication upon me, for it was the wonder and beauty of Nature that touched me most; something like the delight of ecstasy swept over me when I read of sunrise in the Indian Caucasus.... "The point of one white star is quivering still, deep in the orange light of widening morn beyond the purple mountains ..." and it was a genuine astonishment to me that so few, so very few, felt the slightest response, or even noticed, a thousand and one details in sky and earth that delighted me with haunting joy for hours at a stretch.
With Kay, my late "partner in booze," as I had heard him called, there was sufficient response in these two particulars to make him a sympathetic companion. If these things were not of dominant importance to him, they were at least important. Humour and courage being likewise his, he proved a delightful comrade during our five months of lonely island life. What his view of myself may have been is hard to say; luckily perhaps, Kay was not a scribbler.... He will agree, I think, that we were certainly very happy in our fairyland of peace and loveliness amid the Muskoka Lakes of Northern Ontario.
Our island, one of many in Lake Rosseau, was about ten acres in extent, irregularly shaped, overgrown with pines, its western end running out to a sharp ridge we called Sunset Point, its eastern end facing the dawn in a high rocky bluff. It rose in the centre to perhaps a hundred feet, it had little secret bays, pools of deep water beneath the rocky bluff for high diving, sandy nooks, and a sheltered cove where a boat could ride at anchor in all weathers. Close to the shore, but hidden by the pines, was a one-roomed hut with two camp-beds, a big table, a wide balcony, and a tiny kitchen in a shack adjoining. A canoe and rowing-boat went with the island, a diminutive wharf as well. On the mainland, a mile and a half to the north, was an English settler named Woods who had cleared the forest some twenty-five years before, and turned the wilderness
into a more or less productive farm. Milk, eggs
