The wonder of his getting to
Musk Island in that fashion was, however, eclipsed by the wonders he
found when he did get there. Musk-hedges and bowers ten feet high,
with flowers as large as bindweed blossoms, and ladies with pale gold
hair all dressed in straw-coloured satin, and with such lovely faces
that the captain vowed that no power on earth should move him till he
had learned enough of the language to propose the health of the Musk
Island beauties in a suitable speech after dinner. "And there he would
have lived and died, I believe," Fred would say, "if that first mate,
who saved his life before, had not rescued him by main force, and
taken him back to his ship."
I am reminded of this story when I think of the island in Linnet Lake,
for we were so deeply charmed by it that we very nearly broke our
voyage, as the captain broke his, to settle on it.
Mr. Rowe called the lake Linnet Flash. Wherever the canal seemed to
spread out, and then go on again narrow and like a river, the
barge-master called these lakes "flashes" of the canal. There is no
other flash on that canal so large or so beautiful as Linnet Lake, and
in the middle of the lake lies the island.
It was about three o'clock, the hottest part of a summer's day, and
Fred and I, rather faint with the heat, were sitting on a coil of rope
holding a clean sheet, which Mr.
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