This was in western Canada. Toronto was separated from Yorkville, but was a busy, substantial city. I remember the stores being closed when Lincoln was buried, and black bunting hung along the principal streets. I remember, too, the men who were loudest in their curses at the government and against Lincoln, how the tears came to their eyes, and how that event brought them to their senses. Most of them were shoemakers from New England. In 1873 I crossed into Michigan with my family. Even as late as that the greater part of northern Michigan, and especially the upper peninsula, was _terra incognita_ to most of the people of that State. The railroads stopped at a long distance this side the Straits of Mackinaw. The lumbermen had but skimmed the best of the trees; and, with the exception of a few isolated settlements on the lakes and up the larger rivers, it was an unbroken wilderness, abounding in fish, deer, bears, wolves, and wild-cats; in fact, a hunter's paradise, as it is even to this day. But with the extension of the railways to the Straits of Mackinaw, and the opening of new lines to the north into the iron mines of Menominee to the Gogebic range, the great copper mines of the Keweenaw peninsula, and the ever-increasing traffic of the lakes, the changes were simply marvellous. Some things I shall say will seem paradoxical, but they are nevertheless true to life. The greater parts of southern Michigan and southern Wisconsin were settled by people from New York State; and long before the northern parts of Michigan and Wisconsin were opened up, new States had risen in the West, and the tide of immigration swept past towards new frontiers, leaving vast frontiers behind them. Sometimes a few stray men with money at their command would pierce the country and form a settlement, as in the case of Traverse City. Here for years the mail was brought by the Indians on dog-sledges in the winter. It took eight days to reach Grand Rapids on snow-shoes. It is four hundred miles by water to Chicago. Sometimes the winters were so long that the provisions had to be dealt out very sparingly; but all the time the little colony was growing, and when at last the railroads reached it, the traveller, after riding for miles through virgin forests, would come upon a little city of four thousand people, with good churches, fine schools, and one store that cost one hundred thousand dollars to build.