He had nothing but York State pumpkins and wild cranberries for his Thanksgiving dinner, with salt pork for turkey; and he lives to-day in one of the great fruit belts of the world, and ships his turkeys by the ton to the East; and to-day in the North the same experience is going on. Places where the mention of an apple makes the teeth water, and where you can still see them come wrapped in tissue paper like oranges, and yet, paradoxical as it may seem, you can enter a lumber-camp and find the men regaled on roast chicken and eating cucumbers before the seed is sown in that part of the country. Here are farms worth over eighty thousand dollars, which but a few years ago were entered by the homesteader who had to live on potatoes and salt, and cut wild hay in summer, and draw it to town on a cedar jumper, in order to get flour for his hungry children. Here on an island are men living who used to leave their farming to see the one steamer unload and load, or watch a schooner drawn up over the Rapids, and who now see sweeping by their farms a procession of craft whose tonnage is greater than all the ocean ports of the country. I have sat on the deck of a little steamer and drawn pictures for the Indians, who took them and marched off with the smile of a schoolboy getting a prize chromo, and in less than five years from that time I have at the same place sat down in a hotel lighted with electricity, and a menu equal to any in the country, with a bronze portrait of General Grant embossed on the top. Within ten years I have preached, with an Indian chief for an interpreter, in a log house in which a half-brother of Riel of North-Western fame was a hearer, where to-day there are self-supporting churches and flourishing schools. Less than sixteen years ago I stopped at the end of the Michigan Central Railway, northern division; every lot was filled with stumps. A school was being rapidly built, while the church had a lot only. The next time I visited the town it had fine churches and schools. The hotel had a beautiful conservatory filled with choice flowers. I could take my train, pass on over the Straits of Mackinaw, on by rail again, and clear to the Pacific, with sleeper and dining-car attached. [Illustration: VIEW NEAR PETOSKEY, MICHIGAN. _Page 20._] But once leave your railway, and soon you can get to settlements twenty years old which saw the first buggy last year come into the clearings. Here are deep forests where the preacher on his way home from church meets the panther and the wild-cat, and where as yet he must ford the rivers and build his church, the first in nine thousand square miles. III. THE MINUTE-MAN ON THE FRONTIER.