This town has lately crept modestly into our western literature as "Friendship Village." [Footnote: Zona Gale, "Friendship Village." Macmillan, New York, 1908.] Except that it has a more comely setting than most towns of the plains--even of those northern plains with their restful undulations--and has a brighter, cleaner aspect --since a light-colored brick is used instead of the red so much in favor where wood is forbidden by the fire laws--it is a typical western town-- the next size larger than "Aramoni"; and so I must stop here for a moment where Marquette, son of Rose de la Salle of Rheims, and Joliet, the wagon maker of Quebec, came up out of the twisting little stream that is still one of the fountains of the Atlantic. For none the less is this village, standing beside this fountain (again more euphoniously called the Kaka-ling or Kaukauna), itself touching the Atlantic shores and even mingling with currents that reach the European coasts. There was born in this village the historian [Footnote: Frederick Jackson Turner.] who has written so well of the rise of that western country that he has been called to the professorship of American history at Harvard University, a literal son of the portage, who has rediscovered the west to the world. And recently all the valley, and other valleys, too, have been reading the stories of this place of portage (called, as I have said, "Friendship Village"), written by a young woman whose windows look out from her home upon the Wisconsin River not many paces from Marquette's place of embarkation--a true daughter of the portage. The French, who have given the new continent this portage path out of Europe into the very heart of America, should read with some gratification of the more intimate life that dwells there back of and in the midst of the bustling, tireless, noisy industry of the valley. "The long Caledonian hills" [the same which La Salle describes], "the four rhythmic spans of the bridge" [a bridge of iron, not of vines and flowers such as Chateaubriand describes], "the nearer river, the island where the first birds build--these teach our windows the quiet and the opportunity of the home town, its kindly brooding companionship, its doors to an efficiency as intimate as that of fairy fingers." [Footnote: "Friendship Village," p. vii, author's note.] And this is but one of thousands of "home towns" in that great basin, towns with Daphne streets and Queen Anne houses, and gloomy court-houses and austere churches and miniature libraries, towns that taper off into suburban shanties, towns that have in these new bottles, of varied and pretentious shapes, the best wine of that western world.