The height of the silver production at Cobalt was reached in 1911, when thirty-one million ounces of the metal was refined. Since then the yield has declined, but mining engineers say that the district will produce silver in commercial quantities for another half century. Eight mines are still each shipping a quarter million ounces or more of silver a year, and one of them, the Nipissing, is producing annually an average of four million ounces. Its huge mills, where the ore is crushed and the silver taken out, can be seen across the lake bed from the railway station, with gigantic overhead conveyors carrying the rock from the mine to the mill. Silver is now being extracted in paying quantities from what was once considered waste ore, and the tailings previously dumped into the lakes have been treated in the mills, yielding a net profit of three dollars’ worth of silver a ton. In the meantime, the original three-mile radius of the silver-producing area has been extended twenty miles to the southeast and sixty miles to the northwest. The entire Cobalt region seems to be one vast rock covered with a thin skin of earth. I have visited the chief silver regions of the world, but nowhere have I seen the metal cropping out on top of the ground as it does here at Cobalt. The veins run for hundreds of feet across the country, and often show up on the surface. I saw one mine where the earth had been stripped off to the width of a narrow pavement for a distance of a thousand feet. The rock underneath, which had been ground smooth by glaciers, looked when cleaned much like a flagged sidewalk. Winding through it was a vein of almost pure silver, so rich that I could see the metal shine as though the rock were plated. I walked over this silver street for hundreds of feet, scouring the precious metal with my shoes as I did so. These veins are not regular in width nor do they run evenly throughout. Here and there branches jut out from the main one like the veins of a leaf, and the ore has everywhere penetrated into the adjoining rocks. For a long time the work here was more like stone quarrying than mining. The country about is cut up by long trenches from ten to twenty feet deep and five or more feet in width, which have been blasted out of the rock to get the ore. The sides of the hills are now quarried where the silver breaks out, and the veins are followed down into the ground for long distances. One mining company has sunk a shaft to a depth of four hundred and fifty feet, and has excavated about thirty-seven miles of tunnels. So far, no one knows how deep the veins go. The geologists say that the silver will lessen in extent as it descends, and it is claimed that this has been the case with many of the mines.