"Above his broad Lake Ossipee, Once more the sunshine wearing, Stooped, tracing on that silver shield His grim armorial bearing. "For health comes sparkling in the streams From cool Chocorua stealing: There's iron in our northern winds; Our pines are trees of healing." Lake Winnepesaukee, thus magnificently outstretched in front of these lofty hills, is twenty-five miles long and in the centre about seven miles wide, covering a surface, exclusive of its many islands, of seventy square miles. It has wonderfully transparent water, being fed by springs, and its outline is very irregular, pierced by deep, elongated bays, and having broad peninsulas or necks of land stretching far out from the mainland. The shores are composed mostly of rocks, myriads of boulders being piled up along the water's edge as if for a wall, making an attractive rocky border with the foliage growing out of it. An archipelago of islands of all sizes and characters is dotted over the lake, there being two hundred and seventy-four of them, several having inhabitants. These are what Starr King calls "the fleet of islands that ride at anchor on its bosom--from little shallops to grand three-deckers." This attractive lake is the storage-reservoir for the many mills on the Merrimack, keeping their water-supply equable throughout the year by a dam at the Weirs, the western outlet, raising the surface six feet and making its level about five hundred feet above the sea. The railroads approach the lake both at the Weirs and at Wolfboro' on the eastern verge, and steamboats take the people over the lake to the various settlements on its shores. Wolfboro' was named after the British General Wolfe who fell on the Plains of Abraham, and is the largest town on the lake, having three thousand people. It has a beautiful outlook over the water from the adjacent high hills of Copple Crown and Tumble-Down Dick, the latter getting its name from an unfortunate blind horse "Dick," who once fell over a cliff on its side.