It is interesting to go through these factories and see the work of Lake Superior in harness. In the pulp mills, where more than a hundred huge truck loads of news-print are turned out every day, I saw the logs ground to dust, mixed with water, and made into miles of paper to feed printing presses. The output is so great that every three months enough paper is made to cover a sidewalk reaching all the way round the world. In the saw-mills millions of feet of lumber are being cut into boards for the markets of the United States, and in the veneering works birch logs as big around as a flour barrel are made into sheets, some as thin as your fingernail, and others as thick as the board cover of a family Bible. Here we see that the logs are soaked in boiling water and then pared, just as you would pare an apple, into strips of wood carpeting perhaps a hundred feet long. These strips are used for the backing of mahogany and quartered oak sent here from Grand Rapids and other places where furniture is made. One often thinks he is getting solid mahogany or solid oak, whereas he has only the knottiest of pine or other rough wood on which is placed a strip of birch, with a veneer of mahogany or oak on top. The thick birch strips are used also for chair and opera seats. Near the saw-mills is the Clergue steel plant, with its smoke stacks standing out against the blue sky like the pipes of a gigantic organ. The works cover acres and turn out thousands of tons of metal products every day. They are supplied by the mountains of iron ore lying on the shores of Lake Superior not far away, with great steel unloaders reaching out above them. Sault Ste. Marie is one of the oldest settlements in the Dominion of Canada. Here in 1668, Father Marquette established the first Jesuit mission in the New World, and the priests who followed him were the first white men to travel from lower Canada to the head of the Great Lakes, where now stand Port Arthur and Fort William. The town of to-day is a bustling place of almost twenty-five thousand population. It is connected with its American namesake on the opposite bank of the river by a mile-long bridge of the Canadian Pacific Railway. On both sides of the Saint Mary’s River are the locks of the famous “Soo” Canal, where the Great Lakes freighters and passenger boats are lowered and raised twenty feet between the levels of Lakes Superior and Huron. The first canal was built around the rapids in 1798, to accommodate the canoes of the Indians and fur traders. Along it ran a tow-path for the oxen that later pulled the heavier loads. That canal was destroyed by the United States troops in the War of 1812.