THE first time I saw Lake Superior it had no sky-line. The month was January; the thermometer was away down below zero; the double windows of the railway car were frosted over, and it was impossible to distinguish where the ice-field faded into grey mist.

a

a

The second time it had no sky-line either, although the month was August, and I was standing on the deck of a steamer. The water is cold all the year round: in the middle of the lake the temperature is always about 38° Fahr., summer and winter; and evaporation sets in easily, so that fogs are by no means rare on hot days. But I was decidedly annoyed, for I had come to see things, and there was nothing to look at except thick wall of white haze and female lunatic photographing it. That woman actually had a camera set up on a tall tripod on the hurricane-deck, and was focussing it on space. A little later the shores became dimly visible, while a jagged tear of lightning ripped down, red and angry, as if trying to dissipate the heavy blue clouds overhead. The long, narrow, upper deck of the Canadian Pacific steamship is higher at the bow than at the stern, and looks exactly like the sole of an old shoe turned up at the toe. We neared Port Arthur at half speed, with the moaning grunt of the fog-horn going at fre

VOL. CLXIX. -NO. MXXIII.

quent intervals. The great siren at the pier-head uttered an answering howl, which echoed away drearily down the black cliffs; and then the sun came out, and sparkled on tiny yachts, and a clumsylooking sailing - boat, manned by Indians, and towing a birchbark canoe astern.

The passengers on this trip were a queer-looking lot: they appeared to be composed principally. of maiden aunts of uncertain age-tall, gaunt women, dressed in black, with weatherbeaten faces and big, useful hands. A few had men travelling with them, who were obviously too young to be their husbands, and too old to be sons. Wherefore we - an American fellow-passenger and myself concluded that they must be nephews, and that they had expectations.

There was

a

He

big, roughheaded man with a beard like a bushranger, and a grey frieze pea-jacket, who was returning from the Yukon and seemed disposed to be friendly. began telling us about Dawson City, and I mentioned the name of the only man I could think of, at the moment, who was out in El Dorado. The bushranger looked up at me suspiciously, "Yes, sir, I do know that man, and I know twenty men personally who have bound themselves by a solemn oath to shoot him the first time they can draw a bead on him." I made up my mind to disclaim

D

ex

acquaintance with Government officials in mining districts till I discovered that my new acquaintance was a travelling preacher with an inclination to advertise the fact; also that he was lacking in a sense of humour. For, on his remarking that there was a large number of elderly ladies on board, a young American doctor plained to him, at length, that once a-year the Canadian Pacific steamers carried a cargo of superfluous spinsters from the North-West Territories and British Columbia to Owen Sound, where they were quietly disposed of, by euthanasia, in a lethal chamber kept for that purpose by the Government, and the preacher looked at us suspiciously and then rebuked us for irreverence. After which we got into the open sea, and he took to studying the gulls through a pair of dilapidated ivory opera-glasses. It is a queer sensation to be speeding through blue water, out of sight of land; to watch the sea-birds hovering overhead, and to remember that the spray is not salt, and that you are a thousand miles from the Atlantic sea-board. That evening I hung over the rail gazing at the three great lines of colour that forked out from our stern: one, of beaten gold, to the setting sun; one, of dark purple, the shadow of our black - blown smoke; and one, the white foam-beat of the screw. Soon

the man at the look-out donned a heavy fur overcoat, which he told me he wore nearly every night on these cold seas, and I went below to the dazzle and glitter of the saloon. Last year

this very ship made a trip as late as December 7, but she arrived in port with a heavy list to starboard, owing to the weight of ice on her weather side.

There was a concert on below, and some of the aunts developed an unsuspected talent for singing, while others sat stiffly around, with pockethandkerchiefs like napkins folded in neat pyramids on their laps. The songs were nearly all Scotch, and no one ever seemed to be at a loss for the words.

Next day the sun was shining brightly as we steamed into the St Mary river. Here are the great locks (900 feet by 60 feet) of the Sault St Marie Canal, which drop you gently down 18 feet to the level of Lake Huron below. Through these canals during the season of navigation, about 230 days, there passes an aggregate tonnage of some thirty millions, being about double that of the Suez Canal during the entire year. On your port side the river rages down her rocky bed, making her drop of 18 feet in about three-quarters of a mile, and from the deck of the ship you can see the Indian boatmen dancing down in frail canoes, dodging the rocks with a skilful paddle - stroke, and emerging at last from certain death as calm and unruffled as if this were a daily experience, as it is, for them. On the starboard side are American flags.

There are a few other things too, such as warehouses, grainelevators, hotels, and an armypost; but the Stars and Stripes catch your attention first. They fly everywhere, and over every machine. On the Canadian side the flag of Britain was conspicuous by its absence, and the American passengers made unkind remarks; but I remembered the story of Lord Castlereagh at the Congress of Vienna, and was comforted. The Canadians are patriotic; they have proved it, but they don't advertise. An hour afterwards one of the American girls looked at me with solemn eyes es and said, "This is Lake Huron you're on." Then, seeing the reproach on my face, she apologised hurriedly, "The captain got it off on me, and I had to get even with somebody; you go and try it on the missionary." Which I did, and he thanked me gravely, adding that he was already aware of the fact. Then we steamed through the wooded islands and under the green headlands of Georgian Bay to Owen Sound, where we landed to take the short cut to Toronto by rail.

a

We emerged out of a wilderness of railway ties, boulders, and burnt stumps, into a fertile land of apple-orchards, verdurous hills, and zigzag snake fences. Then we pulled up suddenly at small station which we were not "billed" to stop at, and the American doctor and I got out to ascertain the reason. A country cart, smashed all to pieces, couple of prostrate figures with blood - stained handkerchiefs over their faces, and frightened-looking men holding umbrellas to shield them from the sun, told us what had happened. It was not nice to look at, and some

and

a

cry; while a neighbouring innkeeper remarked grimly, "I told them they'd get catched some day at that crossing."

We arrived at Toronto at midday, and I was greeted by a friendly face and promptly carried off to lunch with no further trouble than that of handing three or four checks to a baggage-man who ensured the safe arrival of all my things at the hotel.

Next day we took ship to Niagara. The ship we took, by the way, was an old blockade-runner during the Civil War, and had been subsequently cut in two, and carried in sections through locks and canals, to run between Queenston and Toronto. The mist hung heavy on Lake Ontario for a few miles after we left the bay, and then the sun shone out and turned the strips of sandy beach to silver. Here and there were schooners carrying lumber, and yachts, and big lake steamboats, and then nothing but open water.

The mouth of Niagara river, the water, the trees, the banks, all are green, with every shade of greenness from laurel to pale malachite. To eyes that are tired of gazing at the glare of the sun on the great inland seas, the rest is like a fresh spring to a thirsty traveller in a dry land.

At Lewiston we landed on the American side and took the electric car up the gorge. There is only one recurring thought which spoils the approach to Niagara: you are consumed with envy of the first white man who ever saw touting guides! no hotels! and no patent-medicine advertisements! Still you can forget guide - books and tourists and car conductors, ay, even "Hutch for Dyspepsia," when you see that frantic rush of hurrying water, racing and recoiling, falling and stumbling, leaping high over black, shiny boulders, and flung back from jagged fangs of rock, boiling and bubbling in mad maelstroms in mid-stream, and eddying and churning in cramped whirlpools under the bank, but never pausing in its wild rush through the dark implacable ravine to the still, green expanse below. Then you leave the water's edge a little and enter the town of Niagara Falls, passing a mean, uninviting back street, whose houses are all built with their backs to one of the loveliest views on earth, and their front windows facing on dirty wooden side-walks, straggling cocks and hens, and the squalid row of hovels opposite them. Farther on the town improves, and the main street is wide and well kept, with numberless hotels and restaurants, and stores for the sale of Indian curios, falsely so called, of "souvenirs," and of photographs of the Falls taken from all points of the compass, and at all seasons of the year. From end to end you are beset by touts, would-be guides and would-be Jehus, and by excited "barkers," who assure you that you are "just in time for the finest 25 cent meal on this continent," till at last you emerge into a kind of park of trees and grass.

most be-photographed professional beauty in existence, and the highest compliment one can pay her is to say that it hasn't spoilt her in the least. She is ageless, you see, and no photograph can show you the sunlight in the water. We walked through tall avenues of trees on Goat Island till we came to the Three Sisters, and saw, outspread before us, a great wilderness of dark water, broken here and there into gurgles and spurts of foam, but moving resistlessly on till it suddenly vanishes into space -a vast liquid table-land, with precipitous sides. There was a negro woman sitting alone on a rock close to the edge. She was dressed in gorgeous colours, with a hat like a stuffed parrot, and I cursed her mentally for being out of harmony with her surroundings - till I saw her face. She was quite still, and there was a look in her eyes that made me think suddenly that perhaps the great god Pan had revealed to her secrets which are not told unto white men at the end of the nineteenth century, so I apologised, still mentally.

Nobody will ever describe Niagara, and nobody will ever carry away more than a brief impression or two; for she does not allow you to think, she keeps you too busy feeling. Just on the edge of the brink is a chord of translucent, unripe - emerald green, and then you get an idea of what river looks like when its bed is suddenly cut asunder. There is a curtain of water, flecked and fringed, hanging in strands

a a

and wisps and ropes of foam. Wherever you look downwards there is lustrous rainbow beneath you, and a forest of spray: out beyond that is a Titanic basin of soap-suds. I am quite aware of the bathos of the last simile, but it is true. The river seems half stunned, and is so still that the insolent little Maid of the Mist circles round and round on the surface, carrying her crew of black-hooded phantoms, within a few feet of the cataract itself. The parks that fringe the banks are gay with semi-tropical plants and winding footpaths, and you drive through green glades, with peeps here and there of the whirlpool and rapids, till you arrive at Queenston Heights and the monument to Sir Isaac Brock. Here, if you are wise, you remain at the foot and look at the view: if you are not, you pay a shilling and climb some hundreds of steps to see the same view through a port-hole; and then back to the wharf to thread your way through boxes and boxes of grapes and peaches on to the steamer.

Two or three days on Lake Simcoe, at a point where, less than a generation ago, there was a cedar-swamp, and at night one heard the howl of the wolf and the scream of the wild-cat, till an eccentric American millionaire spent 100,000 dollars or so in converting it into a park that is strangely reminiscent of England-where we met an old inhabitant who had watched Sir Walter Scott marshalling the Highlanders for the reception of George IV. in Edin

a

a

burgh; and then we embarked on another steamer, a sort of floating hotel, with 150 staterooms, and a dining-room on the upper deck where you can sit and gaze your fill out of window during meals. As I drove to the wharf I witnessed the wild and enthusiastic reception of a dozen or so of the fattest khaki-clad warriors I have ever seen, just returned from South Africa, covered with glory and bursting the buttons off their tunics with good living. There were more American tourists on board, some of them not of the best class either; a tall statuesque girl who stood in doorway like a Caryatis in white yachting сар, and "chewed gum" rhythmically; several men whose manners compared very unfavourably with those of certain Red Indians whom I have met; and a few globe-trotters. At night we glided past campfires and luminous tents, loghouses and glimmering bungalows, till about eleven o'clock we neared Charlotte (Americanicé "Shalott") and Ontario Beach. The water glittered under festoons of vari-coloured lamps; in the distance we saw crowds of brightly - dressed people under the sheen of the electric light; and, far away, the strains of the band sounded like fairy music in the glamour of the night. As we approached the wharf a gun fired a salute from an illuminated café, and the siren replied with three long, shuddering hoots. Seated very close together on the pier were a couple of lovers, silhouetted clearly against the