What memory still holds sharply, however, is the face of a young lawyer of our acquaintance, as he looked at me across the fiddle and said casually: “You can live on my island in Lake Rosseau if you like!” Without a moment’s hesitation we accepted the lawyer’s offer of his ten-acre island in the northern lakes. The idea of immediate new enterprise faded. Kay was easily persuaded into a plan that promised a few weeks’ pleasant leisure to think things over, living meanwhile for next to nothing. “I shall go to New York later,” he announced, “and get on the stage. I’ll take Shakespeare up to the island and study it.” He packed his Irving wig. It was the camping-out which caught me with irresistible attraction: the big woods, an open air life, sun, wind and water.... “I’ll come up and join you later,” promised the sanguine Louis B----. “I’ll come with some new plan we can talk over round your camp-fire.” He agreed to pack up our few belongings and keep them for us till we went later to New York. “We’ll all go to the States,” he urged. “Canada is a one-horse place. There are far more chances across the line.” We kept secret our date of leaving, only Louis knowing it. On the morning of May 24th, the Queen’s birthday, he came to fetch us and our luggage, the latter reduced to a minimum. There were no good-byes. But this excitable little Frenchman, who loved a touch of the picturesque, did not come quite as we expected. He arrived two hours before his time, with a wagonette and two prancing horses, his fat figure on the box, flicking his long whip and shouting up at our windows. His idea, he explained as we climbed in, was to avoid the main station, where we should be bound to see a dozen people we knew. He proposed, instead, to drive us twenty miles to a small station, where the train stopped on its way north. There was no time to argue. I sat beside him on the box with the precious fiddle, Kay got behind with our two bags, and Louis drove us and his spanking pair along King Street and then up Yonge Street. Scores recognized us, wondering what it meant, for these were the principal streets of the town, but Louis flourished his whip, gave the horses their head, and raced along the interminable Yonge Street till at length the houses disappeared, and the empty reaches of the hinterland took their place. He saw us into the train with our luggage and our few dollars, waving his whip in farewell as the engine started. We did not see him again till he arrived, thin, worried, anxious and gabbling, in the East 19th Street boarding-house the following autumn.