crescent moon dropped behind the shadows that now line the portage "like a sombre forest," but it is only a few steps through the darkness back into the light and noise of the city of more than two million people. Out of the black loam of this dark portage path fringed by marshes, in the field of wild onions, the newest of the world's great cities has sprung and spread with a promise that exceeds any other on the face of the planet, though within the life of men still living it was but a stretch of lake shore, a marshy plain with a path from its miniature river or creek toward the crescent moon. A metropolis was doubtless predestined on or near the very site of Chicago by natural conditions and the peopling of the lands to the northwest; but Louis Joliet was its first prophet. The inscription on the tablet at the foot of the black cross recites that in crossing this site Joliet recommended it for its natural advantages and as a place of first settlement. And he first suggested the lakes-to-the-gulf waterway--a prospect of which La Salle speaks with disfavor but which over two hundred years later was in some measure realized. The "Jesuit Relation" of August 1, 1674, reporting the conversation of Joliet, who had lost all his precious papers in the Lachine Rapids, makes this interesting prophecy: [Footnote: Thwaite's edition, 58:105.] "It would only be necessary to make a canal by cutting through half a league of prairie, to pass from the foot of the Lake of the Illinois [Michigan] to the River St. Louis [Mississippi].... A bark [built on Lake Erie] would easily sail to the Gulf of Mexico. "The monument to him stands by the canal that has been cut through not merely a league but many leagues (thirty-eight miles) and lets the waters of Michigan flow southward to the Illinois. Of this site Joliet is quoted as saying, "The place at which we entered the lake is a harbor, very convenient for receiving vessels and sheltering them from the wind;" [Footnote: "Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), 58:107.] and of the prairies back of the harbor: "At first when we were told of these treeless lands I imagined that it was a country ravaged by fire, where the soil was so poor that it could produce nothing. But we certainly observed the contrary, and no better soil can be found, either for corn, for vines, or for any fruit whatever.... A settler would not there spend ten years in cutting down and burning the trees; on the very day of his arrival he could put his plough into the ground, and if he had no oxen from France, he could use those of this country, or even the animals possessed by the western savages, on which they ride, as we do on horses. After sowing grain of all kinds, he might devote himself especially to planting the vine, and grafting fruit-trees, to dressing ox- hides, wherewith to make shoes; and with the wool of these oxen he could make cloth, much finer than most of that which we bring from France. Thus