highest headland on the island. Castle Head is a perpendicular columned mass, appearing like a colossal, castellated doorway, flanked by square towers. [Illustration: _Along the Coast at Bar Harbor, Me._] For more than a century after Champlain first looked upon this island, the French made ineffectual attempts at settlement, but it was not until 1761 that any one succeeded in establishing a permanent home. Then old Abraham Somes, a hardy mariner from Cape Ann, came along, and entering the Sound that bears his name, settled on the shore, and his descendant is said to still keep the inn at Somesville on the very spot of his earliest colonization. After the little colony was planted, the cultivation of the cranberry and the gathering of blueberries kept the people alive, these being almost the only food-products raised in the moderate allowance of soil allotted the island. The population grew but slowly, though artists and summer saunterers came this way, and about 1860 it began to attract the pleasure-seekers. When the island, in its early government, was divided into towns, the eastern portion was called, with a little irony, Eden. Bar Harbor, an indentation of Frenchman Bay, having a bar uncovered at low tide, which named it, being easy of access, the village of East Eden on its shores became the fashionable resort. It has a charming outlook over the bay, with its fleets of gaily-bannered yachts and canoes and the enclosing Porcupine Islands, but there is not much natural attractiveness. It is a town of summer hotels and boarding-houses, built upon what was a treeless plain, the outskirts being a galaxy of cottages, many of great pretensions. Here will congregate ten to twenty thousand visitors in the season, and Bar Harbor has become one of the most fashionable resorts on the Atlantic coast. Its bane, however, is the fog, a frequent sojourner in the summer, though even fogs, in their way, have charms. There are days that it lies in banks upon the sea, with only occasional incursions upon the shore, when under a shining sun the mist creeps over the water and finally blots out the landscape. But light breezes and warm sunshine then soon disperse it and the view reappears. The fog-rifts are wonderful picture-makers. Sometimes the mist obscures the sea and lower shores of the attendant islands, leaving a narrow fringe of tree-tops resting against the horizon, as if suspended in mid-air. Often a yacht sails through the fog, looking like a colossal ghost, when suddenly its sails flash out in the sunlight like huge wings. Thus the mist paints dissolving views, so that the fogs of Mount Desert become an attraction, and occasionally through them appears the famed mirage which Whittier describes: "Sometimes in calms of closing day They watched the spectral mirage play; Saw low, far islands looming tall and high, And ships, with upturned keels, sail like a sea the sky."