When you are tired of the city’s din,
And you are sick of the traffic’s boom,
Come out with me, where the life if free
To live where there is room
For a man to sun and stretch himself,
To roam through the forest wide,
To explore alone, through tracks unknown,
To learn where the beavers hide.

We left the city’s noise behind
The monotonous roar that kills,
We left the strife, and the shut-in life,
Set out for the distant hills.
To a little isle on a lake we knew,
To a life both free and gay,
Where the air is clean and the spirits keen,
And there’s peace from day to day.

Where the frogs croak loud in the early morn,
And the winds sigh through the pines;
Where the bathers lie, when the sun is high
Stretched on the beach in lines;
Or else they tramp long forest trails
And climb the hills around,
Then sit and munch, their sandwich lunch
By the streams, which there bound.

Where the sun calls up the sleepers all
To greet another day,
Where the laughing loon, with his doleful croon
Shoots round the lake in play;
And the sleepers rise, to take their dip,
To swim in waters cool,
Then dress in shorts, or clothes of sorts,
For freedom is the rule.

Where there’re crackling fires in the open hearth
When cool the air outside,
And the sun sinks low, with a golden glow,
In the glorious eventide;
Where the nights are long and the air is still,
With friendship and good cheer,
Where the northern light and the moon shine bright
And twinkling, tell if another day,
As fair and warm as this;
Time flies away, from day to day

On this isle of perfect bliss.
Here in the wild we dwell at peace,
Alone ‘mid nature’s joy;
So far from man, there’s nothing can
Our happiness destroy.

Written by Betty Goold-Adams at Amherst House,
1st December 1939

Copyright Riordon Family. Please do not reproduce or use without written permission.