"
It was so lovely, that the same idea seized both Fred and me: Why not
settle here, at least for a time? It was an uninhabited island, only
waiting to be claimed by some adventurous navigator, and obviously
fertile. The prospect of blackberries on the mainland was particularly
fine, and how they would ripen in this blazing sun! Birds sang in the
trees above; fish leaping after flies broke the still surface of the
water with a musical splash below; and beyond a doubt there must be
the largest and the sweetest of earth-nuts on the island, easy to get
out of the deep beds of untouched leaf-mould. And when Mr. Rowe cried
"Look!" and we saw a water-fowl scud across the lake, leaving a sharp
trail like a line of light behind her, we felt that we might spend all
our savings in getting to the Pacific Ocean, and not find when we got
there a place which offered more natural resources to the desert
islander.
If the barge-master would have gone ashore on the mainland out of the
way, and if we could have got ashore on the island without help, we
should not have confided our plans to so doubtful a friend. As it was,
we were obliged to tell Mr. Rowe that we proposed to found a
settlement in Linnet Lake, and he was completely opposed to the idea.
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