Thoroughly acquainted with the Catholic settlements in Minnesota, we cannot call to mind a case where a hard-working, industrious, sober man failed to make a comfortable home for his family. We know of many cases where such a man met with reverses, lost his crop, his cattle, his horses; but never a case where a man met his reverses with a brave heart and trust in God, that he did not overcome them, and come out of the battle a better and prouder man. Let a poor man in the city find his all swept away from him, and what does he do? He slinks into its alleys and lanes, his pleasant, decent rooms are changed for one foul room in a tenement house, from whence, after a little, charity carries him to a pauper's grave. We have spoken of the general prosperity of our Catholic settlements in Minnesota, and we have not to travel far from its capital to find some of them--only into the adjoining county, Dakota, one of the very finest in the State. Fully two-thirds of the lands of the county are owned (mind, _owned_.) by Catholic settlers, Irish and German. Some twenty-five years ago, a few poor Irishmen settled in the timber in this county. It was very generally supposed, at that time, that people could not live on a prairie in Minnesota; but by and by, those who had settled in Dakota county found out their mistake, and commenced making claims on the adjoining prairie, Rosemount prairie, to-day the garden of Minnesota. But not before Hugh Derham, of the County Meath, Ireland, now the Honorable Hugh Derham, came along and put up his shanty on the prairie. "I had seven hundred dollars," he said to us some time ago, "when I came on here; oxen were dear then, and when I had a yoke bought, together with a cow, and my shanty up, I had little or none of the money left. But I went to work, broke up all the land I could, got seed, put in my first crop, and lost every kernel of it." To-day this man owns four hundred acres of improved land, in a circle round his house. Fifty dollars an acre would be a low value to put on his land. Some four years ago his neighbor, a man of the name of Ennis, bought one hundred and twenty acres of land adjoining, for something like ten thousand dollars. When Hugh Derham settled here there was not a railroad nearer than two hundred miles of him, now passengers on the Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad, passing within half a mile in front of his house, point from the windows of the cars to his place, as a model home of a thrifty farmer.