we never were in less danger in our lives.  We were moving peacefully through a long, narrow sheet of perfectly calm water, stretching straight as a die from the river to the upper lake.  If anything had happened, we could have jumped ashore on either side, and another steamer from Buffalo would have come through in a day or two and picked us up.  The only thing possible to fear was that we might ground in the shallow water, an emergency from which we could only be relieved, as there are no tides in the lakes, by the tedious process of lightening the cargo.  It was a perfectly clear evening after a most beautiful day.  But on either side of us, far as the eye could reach, stretched an apparently unbroken forest.  Through the narrow vista cleared for our silvery pathway a slow and stately twilight came solemnly to fold us in its embrace, as we advanced solemnly and slowly from vast and awful solitudes to solitudes more vast and awful still.  As we drew near the lake again, a little light-house gleamed, and, as we swept past it out into the broad expanse of limitless waters, the cheerful throb of the machinery quickened again upon the sea, the pleasant swish of the water against the ship greeted us once more, life, movement, and gayety sprang out again on board, and in an instant the entire steamer had burst into laughter and chat and song.  We were really in far more danger, from storm or collision or fire, out on the great lake; but the sense of awe had been lifted from us.

We were due at Duluth at four o’clock of the following afternoon.  What would she be like, this “zenith city of the unsalted seas,” with such a stately avenue of approach?  At three o’clock we began to see in the distance what seemed to be her cloud-capped towers and domes and palaces; at half-past three a beautiful little humming-bird, blown from the shore, lit on my scarlet necktie and pecked at this strange flower from the East; at four we were at the wharf.

“I think,” said my companion slowly, gazing sorrowfully at the shanties that had made such splendid domes in the distance, “I think I should have called it Delusion, instead of Duluth.  It looks like a town in Dickens’s ‘American Notes’ illustrated by Dor?

Surely never was there a more forlorn little town, trying to scramble up a hillside covered with the tall trunks of dead trees and blackened stumps, shut out from one world by the waste of waters before it, shut in from another by dreary, verdureless hills.  Surely nobody lived there; those could not be homes, those desolate frame houses where people were “staying” awhile.  It seemed as if the whole town, like “Poor Joe,” would soon be told by a vigilant policeman to “move on.”

And we, who were looking forward to Colorado, needed no policeman to urge us to “move on” by the earliest train to St. Paul.

ALICE WELLINGTON ROLLINS.

* * * * *

AURORA.