CHAPTER XIV.

Lake Ontario--Weather observations with regard to it--Area and depth--No underground passage for its waters--Daily horizon of the author--A sunrise described--Telegraph poles an eye-sore--The pleasing exceeds the ugly.

Realizing the fact that the greater part of beautiful Lake Ontario belongs to us, and, likewise, that the most densely populated portion of our province is about its borders, a few facts and observations will, I think, be acceptable to most Canadians. My remarks are founded mainly upon my own observations, from a lifetime residence upon its shores, and also in a measure from Dr. Smith’s report to the United States Government on the fisheries on the lake. First, the lake is a perfect barometer, in this wise: It will foretell the weather to come to us for twenty-four to forty-eight hours in advance, to all who will closely observe it. For instance, suppose we have our coldest winter days, when everything about is held in the tight embrace of Jack Frost, and there is no sign of milder weather, or any relief from the intense cold. Look abroad upon the lake just as the sun is setting, and a light yellow band hangs above the surface of the water. Then in a few hours Jack Frost leaves us, and a thaw is at hand. Or, perchance, during the winter days, when we wish for sleighing, and yet the ground is bare, and it will not come; no sign of snow, nor the feeling of it (as you well know, one can feel it before it really comes). But before that time look abroad upon the surface of the lake, and see a black band extending as far as the eye can reach. Now it is only a few hours, ordinarily about eighteen, before the feeling of snow comes, and then down comes the “fleecy cloud.” It is summer now, and we would know if it will be windy to-morrow. Are there red rays and yellow skies at sunrise? Yes. It will be windy on the morrow. But when the cumulous clouds move easily, and as if not driven above the waters, fine weather old Ontario now gives us--and he always tells the truth. Not to use many words, in the glorious midsummer days, when his surface is just like molten glass, and objects in a depth of sixty feet are clear and distinct, its entrancing beauty comes. Molten glass; but watch, and a mile away you see a streak of ruffled water coming towards you, for just there a puff of wind has caught it. But it dies away and leaves the polished mirror once more to me. Then he rises in his might and tosses our ships about just like old ocean, and sends his spray far upon the shore, and his huge-capped waves advance and recede.

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods; There is a rapture on the lonely shore; There is society where none intrudes By the deep sea, and music in its roar.”

But it never freezes so hard close by the shores as away from its breath. Curious, also, to relate, in the fall it does not “freeze up,” as we say in Canada, as soon as away from it, by two weeks usually. In the spring, again, the frost is gone from the soil quite two weeks before it is gone back from its influence, so I feel safe in asserting that winters upon its shores are one month shorter than they are away from its meteorological influences. And yet leaves do not appear quite close to its waters just as soon as they do a few miles away, anomalous as it may seem, for it does not get warm so quickly as localities more remote. It is never so warm in the summer about it, as it is never so cold in the winter. Dwellers upon its shores rarely, if ever, suffer from extreme heat during the periodical torrid waves which sometimes visit this land. Ontario is the smallest of the Great Lakes--being about 185 miles long, and of an average width of 40 miles, being widest opposite Irondequoit Bay, where it is 55 miles in width. It is some 6,500 square miles in area, of which Ontario owns 3,800. It is 232 feet above the sea, and usually fluctuates but little in height, though in 1891 it was three feet lower than ever before observed. Persons living at Niagara, it is said, remarked on the unusually small amount of water that year passing over Niagara Falls. I am unable in any way to account for that small flow. We are told it is because the tributary streams and the waters of the Falls were less. Granted, but why they were less is far to seek. In most parts the depth of Lake Ontario is about 350 feet, but off

Charlotte, N.Y., it is 600 feet deep, and in some places opposite Jefferson County, N.Y., it is quite 700 feet deep. The eastern portion is the shallowest, being only about 100 feet about South Bay. At the bottom are, in many places, vegetable organisms, furnishing food for those fishes which feed at the bottom. Our sturgeon is a bottom-feeder, and some others. About Stony Point is a rough, rocky and sandy bottom, and the other parts are muddy and clayey. An underground passage to the ocean has been mooted many years by persons who have thought the St. Lawrence could not take away all the flow; that is to say, the waters passing over Niagara Falls and those falling into Lake Ontario by contributory streams, which add much to the flow from the Falls. It is a fallacy; there is no such underground passage, and the St. Lawrence easily takes all the waters from the lake. No current is perceptible in the lake. Pieces of wood upon its surface do not flow as with a current down Kingston way, but invariably come ashore with the first wind. In perfect preservation to-day are many ships which have gone down and now rest upon its bottom. Very probably too, the bodies of passengers upon those ships, confined within the hulls so as to prevent their rising to the surface, and thus getting the air, are there yet, and in perfect preservation, for the waters in the depths are always cool and preservative. Were some expert diver yet to go ghost-like among these cabins, his nerves must be upset with the evidences of human tragedies there so vividly to be seen before him. Mainly, the waters are melted snow, and are manifestly pure, and blessed are those whose homes are about this life-giving lake, as well as about all our other great fresh-water oceans. About the shores of the Mediterranean have been for ages the choicest spots for man’s life; that is to say, the regions where the human family could develop most perfectly, and life there passed was rounded and full. Our old Roman bards, you know, were forever singing about the beauties of Mediterranean shores, their “golden apples of Hesperides,” and sumptuous residences built partly upon the land and partly over the sea. Living on the shores of our Great Lakes is generally conceded now to be most conducive to human development; we have left the Mediterranean shores in the background, and now want only the population, for we have a better condition for human life-development and happiness right here, and far more enjoyable, for the great heat of the ancients’ country is absent here in our new land.

The earth all light and loveliness, in summer’s golden hours, Smiles, in her bridal vesture clad, and crown’d with festal flowers; So radiantly beautiful, so like to heaven above, We scarce can deem more fair that world of perfect bliss and love.

Turn the eye southward, from the town, with its noise, bustle and smoke, and look with me over my daily horizon, which indeed bounds a landscape which my eyes have feasted upon all my days, for the past half-century, save and except the years at college and years of foreign travel. Manifestly at the first, the very first, in fact, the eye catches the more conspicuous objects. And it is, in this instance, a great dead but standing hemlock tree, denuded, it is true, of its foliage, but yet bearing its limbs quite in detail. Like great men, it has died at the top, and its impression upon my retina is always associated with the crows’ congress which I saw in its foliage-less branches last fall. The crow, you know, only partially leaves us hereabout for the winter. Many of them do migrate, it is true, but here along the Lake Ontario shore dead fish are always thrown up by the waves, and he can feed at any time; consequently, he does not leave us. So, upon this elevated, dead tree-top, I saw thousands of them gather, and heard one after another deliver his speech in regular order. Oratory they must have, for their voices were plaintive, defiant and grave, in turn, and I dare not deny them intelligent utterance. Close beside this site of the crows’ congress are a few great, large, sweeping elms, whose branches alone would each make very respectable trees. Always their greenness is visible to me, and the quiet contentment of pose of their branches and leaves is always a pleasure. Great blue-crested herons find convenient resting-places on their highest limbs. Stork-like, these great, gaunt birds stand upon one foot, and turn their heads side-wise, and so wise-like, that one feels so near nature when beholding them that it is uncanny to disturb them. I let the eye wander beyond the high elm limbs, and Ontario’s ultra-marine blue waters are before me, upon the far horizon, beyond my extreme range of vision. And when Old Sol rose this morning from out of Ontario’s waters, he heralded his appearance by throwing up into the sky shafts of light of various colors. Some, indeed, were pure violet for a few moments, and others red, and yellow, and blue, but not the blue of Ontario, so that the contrast may be marked for us. He is coming up swiftly, and in a few moments the colors have all changed, and almost before I can turn my head yellow has suffused the whole in the immediate locality of old submerged Sol. Again, the top of a wheel of fire we see upon the water, and now it is all red about. Old Sol has risen, and a globe of fire is sailing upon the waters’ surface. Could any facile brush only put upon canvas for us these phantasmagorial colors, no one would believe the artist, but accuse him of outdoing nature. And now he shines between me and a high hill upon the lake’s bank, surmounted by trees, green at the top and golden yellow along its sides with ripening grain. Our-red men discovered the very striking beauty of this eminence before Cartier ever sailed up the St. Lawrence, and even before the Indian population moved backward and northward upon those backwater chains, and away from Lake Ontario. To establish this fact most indisputably, we have only to look at the many skulls, and larger human bones, generally, which the ploughshare turns out. Then the red man enjoyed his pagan rites without the intermeddling of the expectant Jesuit missionary, who only came ages and ages after; for, among the bones, we find his flints, skinning stones, and stone tomahawks, but no articles of iron, because the Frenchman, who first came here, had not then given him tomahawks of iron and old flint guns. Imitative whites, whose eyes travelled about the horizon, as did the Indians’, drank in the beauty of the scene inceptively, and they in their turn made it their place of sepulture, and to-day it is the white man’s burial ground, embosomed among the evergreen trees, which Old Sol’s rays are penetrating for me. While I stand and worship at Nature’s shrine in the early summer morn, with the sun’s advent a gentle breeze has risen. God has been specially good to us in giving this sublimely beautiful vision:

“The south wind was like a gentle friend, Parting the hair so softly on my brow, It had come o’er gardens, and the flowers That kissed it were betrayed; for as it parted With its invisible fingers my loose hair, I knew it had been trifling with the rose, And stooping to the violet. There is joy For all God’s creatures in it.”

Down the long, meandering highway my eye rests, and my soul is pained by most irregular, unsightly, great bare poles on either side of it. A beneficent Government has given some grasping fellows the power to put these up and stretch wires upon them, and wrench my soul daily by their ugliness. Europe would not for a moment tolerate such hideous marring of the landscape, but long-suffering Canadians, most law-abiding and complaisant, suffer the nuisance to remain. Not content with the great warty poles, there are huge braces or props leaning to them at every bend in the highway, and I, as the individual, must suffer the sacrilege in silence. A long-suffering people may yet arise in their might and tear these gaunt, denuded forest trees from the face of the earth. There is a forest-covered hill, mainly of second-growth timber, before my eye, and it gloriously crowns what would otherwise be a most unsightly, bald, round eminence. But it is beautiful, dense, green and grand, and a wealthy man, viewing daily this hill upon his horizon, bought the land and keeps the forest that it may please him, and others as well, for their entire lives. Five per cents, or any given per cents, are not to be mentioned in comparison with this good citizen duly honoring his Maker and helping his fellows by his generous act. A forest primeval is before my eye as I turn my glance to the opposite side of the horizon, and it stands high and strong before me. Our native maple has never yet been surpassed for beauty and cleanliness, and here it is our emblem and our pride. Mainly this forest has always been in my mind as the spot where countless myriads of pigeons used to alight in the days gone by. Another forest farther away, and almost out from my horizon, but not entirely gone from it, formed the next nearest roosting-place for this extinct migratory bird, strings of which would fall to my boyhood gun, but now, alas! gone to South America, where food is more abundant and more easily obtained by them. Lesser objects on the horizon do not strike me so forcibly, but as I look more remotely and away over the busy town and its forges, looms and benches, the ridges are clearly marked upon the sky. Geologists have told us these hills were once the shores of a broader Lake Ontario. Evidences of the rocks and pebbles go far to establish that fact, but to us moderns they are very palpable and valuable by keeping off the cold of the north during the inclement season, that we may grow the succulent peach beneath their shelter. “Companies are bodies, indeed, without souls,” for here, with us, the railway company, which exacts its three and a half cents per mile in contravention to its charter, has erected great, unsightly sheds, and stained them a dull red, that their ugliness may be unparalleled. No eye for the beautiful and harmonious can ever be reconciled to the gaunt poles along our highways, wire-bestridden, or to the red architectural sheds of our railway. Summing up, however, the pleasing and unpleasing which I have touched upon, we see that the pleasing and beautiful exceeds the unsightly and ugly. I am indulging the hope that some day, in the near future, a way will be found by which we may enjoy all the best facilities of communication and transportation without having the landscape marred by unsightly poles or ugly railroad sheds. The sensibilities of many of our citizens have been wounded by the act of some individual or company, who, vandal-like, has removed a time-honored familiar forest, or erected a most surpassingly ugly house, barn or warehouse. These marrings of our horizon make life for all more circumscribed, as well as grieve the souls of the cultured. As we love our glorious country, let us beautify and preserve it.