but various reefs are also being profitably worked. During two months of the year the cold is so intense that work is stopped.
We are evidently destined to behold the lake in one of its sulky moods. The clouds are hovering ominously near the mountain tops. A mantle of thick mist is already creeping over the face of the crags, as if to hide their gruesome nakedness.
The name of the valley here has a grim suggestiveness. It is called Insolvent Valley. So called owing to two impecunious ones having managed to cross the lake, and elude their clamorous creditors by threading the passes on horseback, and getting safely away to Lumsden, and the outside world.
At Rat Point we turn the elbow of the lake, and get a glorions view far up its wondrous expanse. The three islands named respectively Tree, Pig, and Pigeon Islands, nestle on the water ahead; and beyond, the eye tries to pierce the obscurity of a wild glen, filled with curling volumes of mist, that lifting at intervals, show mighty pinnacles of rock, and fields of snow stretching into the mysterious distance in seemingly endless continuity.
We stop to land a passenger at the mouth of the Von River, which comes tearing down through the gorges, bringing with it tons upon tons of gravel and shingle, which in its shifting course, terraces the plain, and carries ruin and desolation in its path. During the last few years the stream has shifted its bed fully a mile, and in its migration it has cut away one of the finest orchards that was
