People at home are very apt to despise lakes, perhaps from the usual insipidity of lake poetry, and to imagine that they can exhibit nothing but very placid and tranquil scenery. Lake Erie, the shallowest of the great Canadian fresh-water seas, very soon convinces a traveller to the contrary; for it is the most turbulent and the most troublesome sea I ever embarked upon--a region of vexed waters, to which the Bermoothes of Shakespeare is a trifle; for that is bad enough, but not half so treacherous and so thunder-stormy as Erie. Huron is an ocean, when in its might; its waves and swells rival those of the Atlantic; and the beautiful Ontario, like many a lovely dame, is not always in a good temper. I once crossed this lake from Niagara to Toronto late in November, in the Great Britain, a steamer capable of holding a thousand men with ease, and during this voyage of thirty-six miles we often wished ourselves anywhere else: the engine, at least one of them, got deranged; the sea was running mountains high; the cargo on deck was washed overboard; gingerbread-work, as the sailors call the ornamental parts of a vessel, went to smash; and, if the remaining engine had failed in getting us under the shelter of the windward shore, it would have been pretty much with us as it was with the poor fellow who went down into one of the deepest shafts of a Swedish mine. A curious traveller, one of "the inquisitive class," must needs see how the miners descended into these awful depths. He was put into a large bucket, attached to the huge rope, with a guide, and gradually lowered down. When he had got some hundred fathoms or so, he began to feel queer, and look down, down, down. Nothing could he see but darkness visible. He questioned his guide as to how far they were from the bottom, cautiously and nervously. "Oh," said the Swede, "about a mile." "A mile!" replied the Cockney: "shall we ever get there?"--"I don't know," said the guide. "Why, does any accident ever happen?"--"Yes, often."--"How long ago was the last accident, and what was it?"--"Last week, one of our women went down, and when she had got just where we are now, the rope broke."--"Oh, Heaven!" ejaculated the inquisitive traveller, "what happened to her?" The Swede, who did not speak very good English, put the palm of his right hand over that of his left, lifted the upper hand, slapped them together with a clap, and said, most phlegmatically--"Flat as a pankakka."