A Queer Race: The Story of a Strange People — page 98: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

A QUEER RACE. 95 This incident set me wondering whether my conductors’ keenness of vision, acuteness of hearing, strength of limb, and monkey-like agility were peculiar to themselves, or common to all the inhabitants of the island. After a while I squinted through my binocular again, albeit I felt that the aet was a somewhat painful confes- sion of physical inferiority. Mr. Fane was quite right. Icould now, being a mile or so nearer, plainly distinguish a flag flying from the roof of the house in which, as | presumed, dwelt the island queen, But how we were to reach the place did not seem quite clear, for shortly afterward the creek began to trend in the opposite direction. When I asked Field, he smiled, and said: “Wait a few minutes, and you will! see.” The few minutes brought us to a point where the stream divided into two branches, one of which forked off to the right, the other to the left. We followed the latter, © which, after running for a mile or more between high banks, widened into a beautiful lagoon, or, rather, fairy lakelet. In shape it was oval, and at its widest part about five miles across. Its shelving shores were laid out in orange groves and flower gardens; richly plumed birds skimmed its waters, as clear as crystal and as blue as the heavens; gayly painted boats rode lazily at anchor, while others, trimming their wing-like sails, floated leisurely to- ward a channel which seemed to wind round the base of the mountain. It had been rightly called Fairhaven. . Except in Italy and Switzerland, I had seen nothing with which it could be compared. It was as gracious as Como, as romantic as the Lake of the Four Cantons; and though the land- scape may hava lacked the grandeur of the Alps, the rich- ness of the flora, the proximity of the ocean, and the rugged crest of the mountain, emerging from a mass of verdure and diademed with a silvery cloud, gave this part of the Fair Island a beanty all its own. (E(0) mm G yoo) “S (E(O)