comes in view, its bright aspect of industrial life, its busy streets, spacious warehouses, fine shops, and thronging commerce, challenge our love of the good and beautiful in civilized life.  Indeed, this handsome and prosperous city is one of the most pleasant and interesting places which attract the traveller’s attention along the two thousand miles of this navigable river.

Many, in coming to the “Northwest” by the way of Chicago, travel as far as La Crosse by rail, where abundant opportunities are had for steam transportation to St. Paul, and all intervening towns.

The islands have now so multiplied that here, and for some distance above, the river seems more an archipelago than anything else.  Islands of all sizes and shapes, wooded and embowered with a great variety of shrubs and vines, so that in springtime they seem like emeralds set in this “flashing silver sea;” and when summer is ended, and the frost-king has come, they are robed in royal splendor—­in crimson and purple and gold—­seeming to be the fanciful and marvellous homes of strangest fairies, who, during this season of enchantment hold, it is said, at midnight, high carnival on the islands of this upper and beautiful river.  Be that as it may, they certainly add to the attractions of a sail along this “Father of Waters,” and give picturesqueness to the landscape which, before seeing, we had not credited with so much of interest and beauty as we found it to possess.

A couple of hours’ additional steaming brings us to the lofty peaks standing on the left of the river, one of which, from the resemblance of its crest to the crown of England, has given rise to the names of Victoria and Albert.  They are over five hundred feet in height, and believed to be the tallest of any of the cliffs along the river.  Beyond, on the right, stands boldly the lone sentinel of Mountain Island, at the base of which is the small village of Trempeleau, where a moment’s halt is made, and the wheels of the great ship splash through the water again, all tremulous with nervous energy and pent-up power as they bend slowly to their slavish labor; and, the only labor that man has any right to make a slave of is that with iron arms and metallic lungs.  He may compel these to work and groan and sweat at every pore with honor to himself and the added respect of all mankind.

A few miles further and the city of

WINONA

is in view.  This is the most populous town in the State of Minnesota south of St. Paul.  It occupies a low, level tract projecting from the base of the bluffs, which circle its rear in the shape of an ox-bow, and, in times of high water, becomes an island, owing to its great depression at its junction with the bluffs.  The town stands on the front of this low plateau, along the channel of the river, and has a population of nine thousand people, counting the nomadic lumbermen, who live half the year in the piny woods many hundred miles to the north, and the other half are floating on the rafts down the river; a rough but useful people, who betimes will lose their heads and winter’s wages in a single drunken fray, which they seem to consider the highest pleasure vouchsafed to them each season as they return to the walks of civilized life.