as though seen through plate-glass.  Follow in fancy the outpourings of this wonderful basin; seek its future course in Huron, Erie, and Ontario, in that wild leap from the rocky ledge which makes Niagara famous through the world.  Seek it farther still, in the quiet loveliness of the Thousand Isles; in the whirl and sweep of the Cedar Rapids; in the silent rush of the great current under the rocks at the foot of Quebec.  Ay, and even farther away still, down where the lone Laurentian Hills come forth to look again upon that water whose earliest beginnings they cradled along the shores of Lake Superior.  There, close to the sounding billows of the Atlantic, 2000 miles from Superior, these hills—­the only ones that ever last-guard the great gate by which the St. Lawrence seeks the sea.

There are rivers whose current, running red with the silt and mud of their soft alluvial shores, carry far into the ocean the record of their muddy progress; but this glorious river system, through its many lakes and various names, is ever the same crystal current, flowing pure from the fountain-head of Lake Superior.  Great cities stud its shores; but they are powerless to dim the transparency of its waters.  Steamships cover the broad bosom of its lakes and estuaries; but they change not the beauty of the water-no more than the fleets of the world mark the waves of the ocean.  Any person looking at the map’s of the region bounding the great lakes of North America will be struck by the absence of rivers flowing into Lakes Superior, Michigan, or Huron from the south; in fact, the drainage of the states bordering these lakes on the south is altogether carried off by the valley of the Mississippi-it follows that this valley of Mississippi is at a much lower level than the surface of the lakes.  These lakes, containing an area of some 73,000 square miles, are therefore an immense reservoir held high over the level of the great Mississippi valley, from which they are separated by a barrier of slight elevation and extent.

It is not many years ago since an enterprising Yankee proposed to annihilate Canada, dry up Niagara, and “fix British creation” generally, by diverting the current of Lake Erie, through a deep canal, into the Ohio River; but should nature, in one of her freaks of earthquake, ever cause a disruption to this intervening barrier on the southern shores of the great northern lakes, the drying up of Niagara, the annihilation of Canada, and the divers disasters to British power, will in all probability be followed by the submersion of half of the Mississippi states under the waters of these inland seas.