Sir James Outram quotes the final verdict of one whom he describes as "a close observer of nature and enthusiastic lover of the picturesque," to this effect: "I have travelled in almost every country under heaven, yet I have never seen so perfect a picture in the vast gallery of Nature's masterpieces." And Outram himself writes: "As a gem of composition and of colouring it is perhaps unrivalled anywhere. To those who have not seen it words must fail to conjure up the glories of that 'Haunted Lake among the pine-clad mountains, forever smiling upward to the skies.' A master's hand indeed has painted all its beauties; the turquoise surface, quivering with fleeting ripples, beyond the flower-strewn sweep of grassy shore; the darkening mass of tapering spruce and pine trees, mantling heavily the swiftly rising slopes that culminate in rugged steeps and beetling precipices, soaring aloft into the sun-kissed air on either side; and there, beyond the painted portals of the narrowing valley, rich with the hues of royal purple and of sunset reds, the enraptured gaze is lifted to a climax of superb effects, and the black walls of Mount Lefroy, surrounded by their dazzling canopy of hanging glaciers, and the wide gable-sweep of Mount Victoria, resplendent with its spotless covering of eternal snow, crown the matchless scene. The azure dome of heaven, flecked with bright, fleecy clouds like angel's wings, completes the picture." Tom Wilson seems to have been the first white man to visit the shores of Lake Louise. At least his is the first visit of which there is any record. According to Wilcox, he camped with a pack train near the mouth of the Pipestone in 1882, when some Stony Indians came along and placed their tepees near him. "Not long after, a heavy snow-slide or avalanche was heard among the mountains to the south, and in reply to inquiry one of the Indians named Edwin, the Gold Seeker, said that the thunder came from a 'big snow mountain above the lake of little fishes'. The next day Wilson and Edwin rode through the forests to the lake of little fishes, which was named subsequently for the Princess Louise," then in Canada as the wife of the Governor General, the late Duke of Argyll. Professor A. P. Coleman, of Toronto University, who has spent many summers in the Canadian Rockies, and to whom we are indebted for one of the most comprehensive and entertaining narratives of exploration in this fascinating field, visited Lake Louise two years after Tom Wilson. "I scrambled along its shores," he says, "then unnamed and without marks of human habitation where the comfortable chalet now rises." Many of us would give a good deal to treasure in our memory a picture of Lake Louise sans chalet and sans tourists.