During 1805 Mr. Eaton, the American consul at Tunis, made an agreeable arrangement with Hamet Caramelli, the legitimate but exiled Bashaw of Tripoli, for his restoration to his seat, badly filled by his brother; and to carry out the plan, he started from Alexandria, in Egypt, in company with the sable Hamet, seventy American seamen and four hundred and thirty Arabs. After traversing a thousand miles of desert sands, he fought two severe battles, took Derne, the capital city of the chief province of Tripoli, and would have deposed the cruel reigning Bashaw, and opened the prison doors shut on hundreds of innocent Christian captives,—Eaton’s principal object in the romantic expedition,—but for a hasty, jealous, and disreputable treaty got up between Tobias Lear, Consul-General of the United States, and the Bey, whereby we agreed to pay the crowned bandit $60,000 in silver, instead of in leaden pieces, for the ransom of our sailors enmeshed, like flies, in the old spider’s web. The nation never liked that play of Lear. They always thought of this its principal act, with the Earl of Kent:— “There is division, Although as yet the face of it be covered With mutual cunning ’twixt Albany and Cornwall.” Had these successive and armed protests by America against the Barbary habit of enslaving white Christian captives, taken in war, been properly seconded by the European powers, the dusk Mussulman of Northern Africa would have been then converted from the old Roman practices to which they willingly succeeded,—practices which the author of Don Quixote, himself an Algerine captive for five years, had punctured with his sharp quill over two centuries before, and which Lord Exmouth, with a British fleet, so riddled with shotted logic, in 1816, as to silence forever. While the play of Lear was so badly acted on the shores of the Mediterranean, Michigan, toddling up from between the lake coasts that bordered her double peninsula, left her ancient name of Wayne County and the protecting hand of Indiana, and assumed an independent territorial _status_. Her lymphatic temperament enabled her to suck up through her many aquatic ducts an arterial circulation which helped her to stand pretty successfully the dry-cuppings of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. In straits often she has worked her way with moderate success through her Superior Lakes and water-courses to the open paths of seaboard trade. The pictured rocks of her great northern lake illustrate in lithography, rarely copied, some traits which she shares with no others. Fortunately for her future independence, the intervention of Lake Michigan prevents her territory from being laid out in city lots by Chicago.