To-day, although still possessing many of the characteristics of the typical mining camp, Cobalt is a busy little city of six or seven thousand inhabitants. The tar shacks and tents have been replaced by modern buildings--banks, churches, stores, and homes--many of them erected since the big fire in 1912. There are good schools, including a school of mines, and the muddy roads have long since given way to sidewalks and streets. Even the lake has gone, its waters having been pumped away to allow mining operations, and where it once rippled peacefully some of the richest veins in the district are now being worked. Kerr Lake, a short distance from the town, has also been drained to allow safer underground workings. The place reminds one of the mines of the Bay of Nagasaki, Japan, where coal has been taken out of fifty miles of tunnels under the Pacific Ocean. I have visited those tunnels, and have also ridden by electric car through the coal mines under the ocean off the coast of south Chile. The discovery of silver at Cobalt marked the first finding in the Dominion of any precious metal in important quantities between the Atlantic Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. Two railway contractors, employed in the building of the line northward from the town of North Bay, were idly tossing pebbles into the lake when they found some that they believed to be lead. An analysis showed almost pure silver. Shortly afterward a French blacksmith named La Rose stubbed his toe upon a piece of rock where the railway route had been blasted out, and upon picking it up saw the white metal shining out of the blue stone. He conferred with his friends and sent it down to Toronto to be assayed. The report was that it was very rich in silver. La Rose thereupon filed a mining claim, selling the first half of his property to the Timmins corporation for five hundred dollars. Later he disposed of the balance to the same parties, receiving for it twenty-seven thousand dollars, which seemed a fortune to him. It was also a fortune to the purchasers, who took out more than a million dollars’ worth of pure silver. Owing to the general tendency of the people to doubt the existence of precious metals in large quantities in Ontario, and the efforts of those who had made the “strike” to keep their discoveries secret, it was more than two years before excitement over the find reached a climax, and work on a large scale was begun. Since then these mines have produced nearly fourteen thousand tons of silver bullion, worth more than two hundred million dollars. Think what this means! Loaded into cars of thirty-five tons, the total output would fill sixteen trains of twenty-five cars to the train! Made into ten-cent pieces and laid side by side, it would make a band of solid silver twice around the world at the Equator! Manufactured into teaspoons, it would furnish one for every person in the United States, England, and France, with many to spare!