In the morning of an August day I was gathering some last data from the library of one of the greatest, though one of the newest, universities in the world--a two-hours' journey from where the coureur de bois Jean Nicolet, in robe of damask, first looked over the edge of the basin, (Not many years ago I sat there in an assembly of learned men gathered from the ends of the earth and arrayed in academic robes.) In the afternoon I walked over that first and most famous of the French portages, but not content with that, I walked on into the night along the Wisconsin, that I might see the river as the explorers saw it. However, at midnight I took a palace car, with such conveniences as even Louis the Great did not have at Versailles, and woke well up the Mississippi. I spent the day at another great State university and at dusk set off by the actual trails of the French coureurs de bois (only by wheels instead of on foot), first through the woods and along rivers, above Green Bay to the "Soo," then above Lake Huron and the Nipissing and down the Ottawa River, where I saw the second day break, and then on past La Salle's seigniory of St. Sulpice, around Carder's mountain into Montreal, and thence to the Rock of Quebec. It is a common, unimaginative metaphor in the United States to call the engine which leads the mighty trains across the country the iron horse; but it is deserving of a nobler figure. It is the iron coureur de bois, still leading Europe into America, and America into a newer America. CHAPTER X IN THE WAKE OF THE "GRIFFIN" In the lower St. Lawrence Valley, among the French Canadians, where France is best remembered and where the shut-in life is not disturbed by current events or changing conventions or evanescent fashions, I am told there are traces in their language of the sea life of their ancestors on the coasts of Brittany and Normandy. When, for example, a neighbor approaches a farmhouse on horseback he is asked not to "alight" or to "dismount" but to "disembark," and he is invited not to "tie" his horse but to "moor" it. It is as if they were still crying ever in their unconscious memories, "Thalassa, Thalassa"; as if the very shells of speech still carried the roar of the ocean which they who hold them to their ears have never seen.