We spent two days in Buffalo, and they were days well spent. This city is the second in size of the five Great Lake ports, being outranked only by Chicago. Founded in 1801, it now boasts of a population of one hundred and sixty thousand souls. The site is a plain, which, from a point about two miles distant from the lake, slopes gently to the water's edge. The city has a water front of two and a half miles on the lake and of about the same extent on Niagara River. It has one of the finest harbors on the lake. The public buildings are costly and imposing edifices, and many of the private residences are elegant. The pride of the city is its public park of five hundred and thirty acres, laid out by Frederick Law Olmstead in 1870. It has the reputation of being the healthiest city of the United States. Buffalo was the home of Millard Fillmore, the thirteenth President of the United States. Here the great man spent the larger part of his life. He went there a poor youth of twenty, with four dollars in his pocket. He died there more than fifty years afterward worth one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and after having filled the highest offices his country could bestow upon him. He owned a beautiful and elegant residence in the city, situated on one of the avenues, with a frontage toward the lake, of which a fine view is obtained. It is a modern mansion, three stories in height, with large stately rooms. It looks very little different externally from some of its neighbors, but the fact that it was for thirty years the home of one of our Presidents gives it importance and invests it with historic charm. On board a steamer bound for Detroit we again plowed the waves. The day was a delightful one; the morning had been cloudy and some rain had fallen, but by ten o'clock the sky was clear, and the sunbeams went dancing over the laughing waters. Hugh was on his high-horse, and full of historic reminiscences. "Do you know that this year is the two hundredth anniversary of a remarkable event for this lake?" he began. "Well, it is. It was in 1681, in the summer of the year, that the keel of the first vessel launched in Western waters was laid at a point six miles this side of the Niagara Falls. She was built by Count Frontenac who named her the Griffen. I should like to have sailed in it." "Its speed could hardly equal that of the Detroit," observed Vincent, complacently. "You hard, cold utilitarian!" exclaimed the Historian; "who cares anything about that? It is the romance of the thing that would charm me." "And the romance consists in its being distant. We always talk of the good old times as though they were really any better than our own age! It is a beautiful delusion. Don't you know how in walking the shady places are always behind us?" The Historian's only answer to this banter was to shrug his shoulders scornfully and to light a fresh cigar.