The lady laughed, as if such a suggestion were amusing indeed, and said that if she were a man she might attempt it, and perhaps enjoy it to a degree, and when I went on to describe some of the things that I knew about “those great, ugly ships,” as she called them, I am quite sure that all of my words were not received without doubt. This little experience was the last of many that proved to me the assertion I have made before--that to nine people out of ten, at least, our huge, silent, red ships that bring down the wealth of the North are a mystery. They are not beautiful. Freighted low down, their steel sides scraped and marred like the hands of a labourer, their huge funnels emitting clouds of bituminous smoke, their barren steel decks glaring in the heat of the summer sun, there seems to be but little about them to attract the pleasure seeker. From the distance at which they are usually seen their aft and forward cabins appear like coops, their pilot houses even less. [Illustration: The Mesaba Ore Docks.] Yet fortunate is the person who has the “pull” to secure passage on one of these monster carriers of the Lakes, for behind all of that uninviting exterior there is a luxury of marine travel that is equalled nowhere else in the world except on the largest and finest of private yachts. These leviathans of the Lakes, that bring down dirty ore and take up dirtier coal, are the greatest money-makers in the world, and they are owned by men of wealth. The people who travel on them are the owner’s guests. Nothing is too good for them. Each year the rivalry between builders is increasing as to whose ships shall possess the finest “guests’ quarters.” Behind the smoke and dirt and unseemly red steel that are seen from shore or deck, a fortune has been spent in those rooms over the small doors of which one reads the word “Owners.” You may climb up the steel side of the ship, you may explore it from stem to stern, but not until you are a “guest”--not until the “key to the ship” has been handed to you, are its luxuries, its magnificence, its mysteries, clearly revealed. My telegram read: “Take my private room on the _Harry Berwind_ at Ashtabula.” It was signed by G. Ashley Tomlinson, of Duluth. The _Berwind_ is one of the finest of Tomlinson’s sixteen steel ships and is named after one of the best known fuel transportation men on the Lakes--a vessel that can carry eleven thousand tons without special crowding and makes twelve miles an hour while she is doing it. I reached the great ore and coal docks at Ashtabula at a happy moment.