The Isles of Shoals are a remarkable formation--rugged ledges of rock out in the ocean bearing scarcely any vegetation; and on some of them not a blade of grass is seen. Four islands stretching in a line make the outside of the strange group--bare reefs, with water-worn, flinty surfaces, against which the sea beats. Not a tree grew anywhere until a little one was planted on Appledore, in front of the hotel, and another dwarf was coaxed to grow in the little old graveyard on Star Island. Their best vegetation was low huckleberry bushes, until someone thought of gathering soil enough to make grass patches for a cow or two. The utter desolation of these rocks, thus cast off apparently from the rest of the world, can hardly be realized, yet they have their admirers. Celia Thaxter, the poetess, was the daughter of the White's Island lightkeeper, and to her glowing pen much of their fame is due. She died on Appledore in 1894. The curious name of these islands first appears in the log of their discoverer, Champlain, who coasted along here in 1605. They were always prolific fishery grounds, and the name seems to have been given them from "the shoaling or schooling of the fish around them." In a deed from the Indians in 1629 they are called the Isles of Shoals. Captain John Smith visited and described them in 1614, and with his customary audacity tried to name them "Smith's Islands," but without success. The boundary-line dividing Maine and New Hampshire passes through the group between Star and Appledore. The peculiar grouping makes a good harbor between these two, opening westward towards the mainland, and amply protected from the sea by the smaller islands outside. These rugged crags resemble the bald and rounded peaks of a sunken volcano thrust upward from the sea, with this little harbor forming its crater. When Nathaniel Hawthorne visited them, he wrote: "As much as anything else, it seems as if some of the massive materials of the world remained superfluous after the Creator had finished, and were carelessly thrown down here, where the millionth part of them emerge from the sea, and in the course of thousands of years have become partially bestrewn with a little soil." Their savagery during violent storms, when surrounded by surf and exposed to the ocean's wildest fury, becomes almost overwhelming, and they actually seem to reel beneath the feet.