The edge of the Great Lakes' basin is only a little way, at the place where he stood, from the watershed of the Mississippi River. A little farther up the shore, where Celoron made portage, it is only six or eight miles across, and here it is but a little more, and the "height of land" is hardly noticeable. The French built a fort on a promontory in the lake --a promontory almost an island--Presque Isle; and there, where the waters begin to run the other way, that is, toward the gulf, they built still another which they called Le Boeuf, an easier portage than the Chautauqua. From the former fort the city of Erie, a grimy, busy manufacturing city, has grown. The latter has produced only a village, on whose weed-grown outskirts the ruins of a fort still look out upon the meadow where the little stream called "French Creek" starts, first toward France, in its two-thousand-mile journey to the gulf that lies in the other direction. For twenty miles I followed the stream one day to where it became a part of Céloron's river-in imagination calling the French back to its banks again, but finding them slow to come, for that part of the valley seemed not particularly attractive. It is a little farther down the lake that the vineyards fill all the shore from the lake to the watershed. And in that very country I have often wondered at the miracle which raised from one bit of ground the corn and the pumpkin, and from another the vine and filled its fruit with wine. The one-eyed veteran, Legardeur de St. Pierre, the commander of Fort Le Boeuf, asked Washington, in rich diplomatic sarcasm, to descend to the particularization of facts, and the lithe figure disappeared behind the snows of the mountains only to come again across the mountains in the springtime with sterner questioning. There was then no talk of Cabot or La Salle, of Indian purchase or crown property. Jumonville may have come out from Duquesne for peaceable speech, but Washington misunderstood or would not listen. A flash of flint fire, a fresh bit of lead planted in the hill of laurel, a splash of blood on the rock, and the war for the west was begun. What actually happened out on the slope of that hill will never be accurately known; but, though Washington was only twenty-two years old then, "full of military ardor" and "vehement," he could not have been guilty of wilful firing on men of peaceful intent. It doubtless seemed but an insignificant skirmish when Washington attacked Jumonville near Pittsburgh, and it is now remembered by only a line or two in our histories and the little cairn of stones "far up among the mountain fogs near the headwaters of the Youghiogheny River," which marks the grave of Jumonville.