The author of "Friendship Village" has vision of the more beautiful towns into which these towns will some day grow, as yours have grown more beautiful with age. "All the way," she writes, seeing the sunset from that same river of the portage as Marquette saw it, "I had been watching against the gold the jogging homeward of empty carts.... Such a procession I want to see painted upon a sovereign sky. I want to have painted a giant carpenter of the village as I once saw him, his great bare arms upholding a huge white pillar, while blue figures hung above and set the acanthus capital.... Some day we shall see these things in their own surprising values and fresco our village libraries with them." [Footnote: Zona Gale, "Friendship Village Love Stories," p. 47.] That appreciation and expression of the beautiful is something that the French explorers in that other world--the valley reached of the pioneers of the seeing eyes and the understanding hearts--have carried and will continue to carry over those same portages, to give that virile life of the west some of those higher satisfactions of which this daughter of the portage is the prophetess. Another portage path of importance is that which Marquette may also have trodden, or may even have been carried over by his faithful attendants, Pierre Porteret and Jacques, on his death journey from the land of the Illinois to the mission of Michilimackinac, which he did not reach alive-- a journey, the latter part of which was like that of King Arthur borne in a barge by his faithful knight, Sir Bedivere, to his last resting-place, the Vale of Avalon. This portage, varying in length with the season from three to five miles, was the St. Joseph-Kankakee Portage. La Salle, Tonty, and Hennepin passed over it in 1679 on a less spiritual errand to the same land whose inhabitants Marquette had tried to instruct in the mystery of the faith. And it was well worn by adventurous and pious feet in the century that followed. What traffic in temporal and spiritual things was here carried over, is intimated by relics of that century found in the fields not far away, where for many years a French mission house stood with enough of a military garrison to invite for it the name "Fort St. Joseph." In the room of the Northern Indiana Historical Society at this portage there are to be seen some of these relics, sifted from the dirt and sand: crucifixes, knives, awls, beads--which I am told are clearly the loot of ancient Roman cities, traded to the Indians for hides--iron rings, nails, and hinges- these with flint arrow-heads and axes, relics of the first munitions of the stone and iron ages out on the edges of civilization.