The view consisted of the broad lake in front, and the deep forest which stretched unbroken towards the east and the west. The water of the lake was fresh, the great forest was primeval; this made the effect very unlike that of the narrow salt-water sounds, and the chain of islands, large and small, with their gardens and old fields. The South had forgotten her beginnings; but here one could see what all the new world had once been, here one could see traces of the first struggle for human existence with the inert forces of nature. With other forces, too, for Indians still lived here. They were few in number, harmless; but they carried the mind back to the time of sudden alarms and the musket laid ready to the hand; the days of the block-house and the guarded well, the high stockade. The old planter as he walked about did not think of these things. The rough forest was fit only for rough-living pioneers; the Indians were but another species of nigger; the virgin air was thin and raw,--he preferred something more thick, more civilized; the great fresh-water sea was abominably tame, no one could possibly admire it; Port aux Pins itself was simply hideous; it was a place composed entirely of beginnings and mud, talk and ambition, the sort of place which the Yankees produced wherever they went, and which they loved; that in itself described it; how could a Southern gentleman like what they loved? And Port aux Pins was ugly. Its outlying quarters were still in the freshly plucked state, deplumed, scarred, with roadways half laid out, with shanties and wandering pigs, discarded tin cans and other refuse, and everywhere stumps, stumps. Within the town there were one or two streets where stood smart wooden houses with Mansard-roofs. But these were elbowed by others much less smart, and they were hustled by the scaffolding of the new mansions which were rising on all sides, and, with republican freedom, taking whatever room they found convenient during the process. Even those abodes which were completed as to their exteriors had a look of not being fully furnished, a blank, wide-eyed, unwinking expression across their façades which told of bare floors and echoing spaces within. Always they had temporary fences. Often paths of movable planks led up to the entrance. Day after day a building of some sort was voyaging through Port aux Pins streets by means of a rope and windlass, a horse, and men with boards; when it rained, the house stopped and remained where it was, waiting for the mud to dry; meanwhile the roadway was blocked. But nobody minded that. All these things, the all-pervading beginnings, the jokes and slang, the smell of paint, and always the breathless constant hurry, were hateful to the old Georgian. It might have been said, perhaps, that between houses and a society uncomfortable from age, falling to pieces from want of repairs, and houses and a society uncomfortable from youth, unfurnished, and