Lake Ontario, out of which the river St. Lawrence flows, is nearly two hundred miles long, and in some places seventy miles wide. It has generally low shores and but few islands, and the name given it by Champlain was Lake St. Louis, after the King of France. The original Indian name, however, has since been retained, Ontario meaning "how beautiful is the rock standing in the water." Three well-known Canadian cities are upon its shores--Hamilton at the western end, Toronto on the northern coast, and Kingston near the eastern end. Hamilton is a busy, industrial and commercial city of fifty thousand people, having a good harbor. The great port, however, is Toronto, with over two hundred thousand inhabitants, the capital of the Province of Ontario, and the headquarters of the Scottish and Irish Protestants, who settled and rule Upper Canada, the richest and most populous province of the Dominion. Toronto means "the place of meeting," and the word was first heard in the seventeenth century as applied to the country of the Hurons, between Lakes Huron and Simcoe, the name being afterwards given to the Indian portage route, starting from Lake Ontario, in the present city limits, over to that country. Here, in 1749, the French established a small trading-post, Fort Rouille, but there was no settlement to speak of for a century or more. The United Empire Loyalists, under General Simcoe, founded the present city in 1793 under the name of York, and it was made the capital of Upper Canada, of which Simcoe was Governor. The location was an admirable one. The portage led up a romantic little stream, now called Humber River, while out in front was an excellent harbor, protected by a long, low, forest-clad island, making a perfect land-locked basin, sheltered from the storms of the lake. The nucleus of a town was thus started on a tract of marshy land, adjoining the Humber, familiarly known for nearly a half century as "Muddy Little York," which characteristic a part of the city still retains, as the pedestrian in falling weather can testify. Yet the site is a pleasing one--two little rivers, the Humber and the Don, flowing down to the lake through deep and picturesque ravines, having the city between and along them, while there is a gradual slope upward to an elevation of two hundred feet and over at some distance inland, an ancient terrace, which was the bank of the lake.