The Passumpsic River flows from Vermont into the Connecticut a few miles above, and about ten miles up that winding and hill-environed stream is the picturesque town of St. Johnsbury, with about seven thousand people, noted as the location of the extensive Fairbanks Scale Works. St. John de Crevecoeur, the French Consul at New York, was very popular in the Revolutionary times and a benefactor of Vermont, and this town, settled in 1786, was named in his honor. It is related that in 1830, when there was a good deal of excitement about hemp-culture in the United States, the Fairbanks Brothers established a hemp-dressing factory here, and one of them conceived the idea of a platform-scale to weigh the hemp, which construction was the origin of their extensive business, the works sending scales all over the world. The railroad route to Montreal and Quebec ascends the Passumpsic, crosses the watershed, passing Lake Memphramagog at Newport, and then enters Canada. This noted lake is on the national boundary, more than two-thirds of it being in Canada, and is thirty miles long. Memphramagog means the "beautiful water," and the mountain ranges enclosing it with their wooded slopes present fine views. The national boundary is marked by clearings in the forests on either side of the lake. The massive rounded summit of the Owl's Head rises thirty-three hundred feet on the western shore in imposing magnificence, and many other peaks are sentinelled all around. Steamboats ply on the lake from Newport to Magog at the foot, where its waters discharge northward into Magog River and thence flow over the vast plain of Canada, which is so conspicuously contrasted with the mountains to the southward, until at Sherbrooke they reach St. Francis River, and finally the St. Lawrence. Lake Memphramagog has its Indian legends of massacre and escape, but its chief modern tradition is of a noted smuggler named Skinner, who in the early nineteenth century performed prodigious feats of skill in eluding the revenue officers. Near the boundary is Skinner's Island, having a spacious cavern on its northwestern side. The smuggler usually disappeared near this island, which came in time to be named for him, and it is related that one night the officers, having had a long chase, found his boat on this island and turned it adrift on the lake. The smuggler never appeared afterwards, but some years later a fisherman, seeking shelter from a squall under the lee of the island, discovered the cave hidden under foliage and explored it.