Buffalo was the home of Millard Fillmore, the thirteenth President of the United States.  Here the great man spent the larger part of his life.  He went there a poor youth of twenty, with four dollars in his pocket.  He died there more than fifty years afterward worth one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and after having filled the highest offices his country could bestow upon him.  He owned a beautiful and elegant residence in the city, situated on one of the avenues, with a frontage toward the lake, of which a fine view is obtained.  It is a modern mansion, three stories in height, with large stately rooms.  It looks very little different externally from some of its neighbors, but the fact that it was for thirty years the home of one of our Presidents gives it importance and invests it with historic charm.

On board a steamer bound for Detroit we again plowed the waves.  The day was a delightful one; the morning had been cloudy and some rain had fallen, but by ten o’clock the sky was clear, and the sunbeams went dancing over the laughing waters.  Hugh was on his high-horse, and full of historic reminiscences.

“Do you know that this year is the two hundredth anniversary of a remarkable event for this lake?” he began.  “Well, it is.  It was in 1681, in the summer of the year, that the keel of the first vessel launched in Western waters was laid at a point six miles this side of the Niagara Falls.  She was built by Count Frontenac who named her the Griffen.  I should like to have sailed in it.”

“Its speed could hardly equal that of the Detroit,” observed Vincent, complacently.

“You hard, cold utilitarian!” exclaimed the Historian; “who cares anything about that?  It is the romance of the thing that would charm me.”

“And the romance consists in its being distant.  We always talk of the good old times as though they were really any better than our own age!  It is a beautiful delusion.  Don’t you know how in walking the shady places are always behind us?”

The Historian’s only answer to this banter was to shrug his shoulders scornfully and to light a fresh cigar.

Lake Erie is about two hundred and forty miles in length and has a mean breadth of forty miles.  Its surface is three hundred and thirty feet above Lake Ontario, and five hundred and sixty-five above the level of the sea.  It receives the waters of the upper lakes by means of the Detroit River, and discharges them again by the Niagara into Lake Ontario.  Lake Erie has a shallow depth, but Ontario, which is five hundred and two feet deep, is two hundred and thirty feet below the tide level of the ocean, or as low as most parts of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and the bottoms of Lakes Huron, Michigan, and Superior, although their surface is much higher, are all, from their vast depths, on a level with the bottom of Ontario.  Now, as the discharge through Detroit River, after allowing all the probable portion carried off by evaporation,