from the little home ashore, for it is then that visions of sickness, of misfortune, and possibly of neglect cast their gloom. In a hundred other ways that I might describe does one see life on a Great Lakes freighter as on none of the vessels of the salt seas. It is a life distinct from all others, a life that is building a people within itself--the people of the Lake breed. PART II Origin and History of the Lakes I Origin and Early History While the modern romance of the Great Lakes, the vast commerce that has grown upon them, the great cities along their shores, and the part they have played in the history of the last generation form, to my mind, one of the most absorbing and at the same time one of the most fruitful subjects for the writer of to-day, it is to the “dim and mysterious ages of long ago” that one must allow his imagination to be carried, if he would understand, in its fullest measure, the part that our Inland Seas should hold within the hearts of the American people. It has been my desire, in this volume, to establish between our people and our Lakes that bond of friendship which unfortunately has never existed except upon their very shores. In the years in which I have studied the Lakes, their commerce, and their people, I have been astonished at the dearth of material which has been published about them, and not until this discovery came upon me forcefully did I understand that our own glorious Inland Seas, holding in perpetual inheritance for the American people one half of the fresh water of the whole globe, are, indeed, “aliens in the land of their birth.” [Illustration: Arch Rock, Mackinac Island. One of the natural wonders of the world.]