Great as is this lake-commerce now, it is still but in its infancy.  The productive capacities of most of the States which border upon these waters are only beginning to be developed.  If in twenty-five years the trade has grown to its present proportions, what may be expected from it in twenty-five years more?

The secession of the Gulf States from the Union, and the closing of the Mississippi to the products of the Northwest, could we suppose such a state of things to be possible, would still more clearly show the value of the lake-route to the ocean.

Run the line of 36 deg. 30’ across the continent from sea to sea, and build a wall upon it, if you will, higher than the old wall of China, and the Northern Confederacy will contain within itself every element of wealth and prosperity.  Commerce and agriculture, manufactures and mines, forests and fisheries,—­all are there.

THE MAN WHO NEVER WAS YOUNG.

At Munich, last summer, I made the acquaintance of M—–­y, the famous painter.  I had heard much of him during my stay there, and of his eccentricities.  Just then it was quite the mode to circulate stories about him, and I listened to so many which were incredible that I was seized with an irresistible desire to meet him.  I took, certainly, a roundabout way to accomplish this.  M—–­y had a horror of forming new acquaintances,—­so it was said.  He fled from letters of introduction coming in the ordinary way, as from the plague.  Neither prince nor noble could win his intimacy or tempt him out of the pale of his daily routine.  We are most eager in the pursuit of what is forbidden.  I became the more determined to make M—–­y’s acquaintance, the more difficult it seemed.  After revolving the matter carefully, I wrote to America to my intimate friend R., who I knew had subdued “the savage,” as M—–­y was sometimes called, and begged him to put me in the way of getting hold of the strange fellow.  In four or five weeks I received an answer.  R. simply inclosed me his own card with the painter’s name in pencil written on it,—­advising me to go to the artist’s house, deliver the card in person, and trust the result to fortune.  Now I had heard, as before intimated, all sorts of stories about M—–­y.  He was a bachelor, at least fifty years old.  He lived by himself, as was reported,—­in a superb house in an attractive part of the town.  Gossip circulated various tales about its interior.  Sometimes he reigned a Sardanapalus; at other times, a solitary queen graced but a temporary throne.  He was addicted to various vices.  He played high, lost generally large sums, and was in perpetual fear of the bailiffs.  It was even reported that a royal decree had been issued to exempt so extraordinary a genius from ordinary arrest.  In short, scarcely anything extravagant in the category of human occurrences was omitted in the daily changing detail of the scandal-loving society of Magnificent Munich.  Only, no one ever