Adjoining this main shack and connected with it by an uncovered platform are the kitchen and storeroom, but these will not be used in winter. The stores and I will have to stay in the big house if we are not to freeze.
From these buildings little trails run off through the woods to the dock, the pump, the summer sleeping shacks, and a path goes all round the island close to the shore. Away from these beaten tracks are all sorts of hidden nooks and lovely, dim seclusions.
This little rocky island, one of scores that dot the face of the lake, is all a tangle of ferns and vines and wildflowers. It is thickly wooded with white birch, poplar and wild cherry. There are also oaks, maples, pines, and great clumps of basswood, and innumerable little cedars are pushing up everywhere.
Making a way through the overgrown paths in the early morning, I break through myriads of spiderwebs, stretched across from bushes heavy with dew. They feel like the tiniest of fairy fingers brushing my cheek, and laid on my eyelids, light as the memory of a caress. Butterflies dressed in black velvet, with white satin frills and sapphire jewels, flutter on ahead, and the stems of the birches are seen through a gold-green glow, like sunlight shining through clear water. When I sit on the sandy bottom, with the whole lake for my washpot, small fishes, wearing coral buttons and jade green ruffles on fins and tails, bump their blunt noses against my knees.
Sounds from the mainland come across the lake, blurred and indistinct. On the island I hear only the wind in the trees, the water beating against the stones, and the hum of many insect wings.
There is something queer about the island. I am convinced that it stands on some magnetic pole or other, that puts every clock and watch out of order as soon as it is landed here. Cheap or fine, every timepiece breaks a mainspring, and then we fall back on the sundial to tell us what’s o’clock. We can always know when it is noon, provided the weather be sunny. When it is cloudy we guess at the time and wait for the next fine day.
This sundial stands in a clearing beside the house, and bears for its motto, not the high-sounding Latin quotation that seems to belong to sundials, but the trite assertion, “Time is valuable.” A statement wholly untrue, so far as this present life of mine is concerned. A fine bass, now, or a tin of beans perhaps is valuable, but surely not time, in a place where there is nothing to do but eat, sleep, and think.