At Marquette, in the morning, a party of Finnish emigrants on board left the ship. Half a dozen Americanized Finns, who had evidently been the inspiring cause of this influx of new citizens, had come to the wharf to greet the new arrivals. They had the same short stature, the same stolid features, as their relatives on board; but there was a difference. The white shirt, the clean collar, the smart straw hat and vivid necktie, with a vigorous step, alert manner, decisive tones, and a certain tendency to help the women with their heavy boxes, distinctly individualized those who had been awhile under American influence. All day we basked in the sunshine on the captain's bridge. Think of being glad to bask in the sunshine on a 4th of August! Between Marquette and Portage River we passed but one house,--one solitary, lonely house, set on the very edge of the "unsalted sea;" before it a vast expanse of limitless waters, behind it an unbroken, limitless forest; no fields, no crops, no roads, only space enough cleared for the tiny cabin and tinier shed. What had lured people there? What kept them alive? No neighbors, no mail, no farm, no apparent object in life, and only one small rowboat to get away in. Yet they had put a curtain up at the window! No human being could by any possibility look in at that window. Even the curtain could only be detected with an opera-glass from the steamer that passed twice a week. But the sweet instinct of privacy and home had had its way, and every night the little curtain that never shut out anything but the incurious moonlight or the innocent stars was drawn as regularly as the shades of a Fifth Avenue mansion. Later we learned that it was the Life-Saving Station of Lake Superior. "No nap this afternoon, ladies," said the captain as he left the luncheon-table. "You must be on the lookout for Portage River." All the afternoon we watched for the little river, eked out by a canal, that enables us to cut off one hundred and twenty miles of what would be the course around Keweena Point, besides giving what is perhaps the most interesting part of the whole trip. So narrow is the opening of the river that no trace of it is to be seen till we are close upon it; yet swift as the dove from far Palmyra flying, unerring as an arrow from the bow, the great ship sweeps across the lake to exactly the right spot. The river is hardly the width of a canal, yet curves as no canal would ever curve, so that the captain in giving orders has to watch both ends of the vessel to see that neither runs aground. It would be impossible for two steamers to pass each other in the river, and the contingency of their meeting is guarded against by the fact that returning steamers have to go round the Point, being too heavily laden with flour from Duluth. As it was, there were but thirteen feet of water in the river, and the Japan drew twelve.