I have seen few localities so full of promise for the future, not this one little spot in the vicinity of Marquette, but the entire metallic region between Lake Superior and Lake Michigan. Look at the locality! It is half-way across the continent. Lake Michigan laves the southern, Superior the northern shore, while the St. Lawrence furnishes water-carriage to the Atlantic. A hundred and fifty miles of rail from Bayfield will give connection with the navigable waters of the Mississippi. Through this peninsula will yet lie the shortest route between the Atlantic and Pacific. Westward are the wheat-fields of the continent, to be peopled by an industrious and thriving community. There is no point more central than this for easy transportation. Here, just where the future millions can be easiest served, exhaustless deposits of the best ore in the world have been placed by a Divine hand for the use and welfare of the mighty race now beginning to put forth its energies on this western hemisphere. Towns, cities, and villages are to arise amid these hills; the forests and the hills themselves are to disappear. The product, now worth seventeen millions of dollars per annum, erelong will be valued at a hundred millions. I think of the coming years when this place will be musical with the hum of machinery; when the stillness of the summer day and the crisp air of winter will be broken by the songs of men at work amid flaming forges, or at the ringing anvil. From Marquette, and Bayfield, and Ontonagon, and Escanaba, from every harbor on these inland seas, steamers and schooners, brigs and ships, will depart freighted with ore; hither they will come, bringing the products of the farm and workshop. Heavily loaded trains will thunder over railroads, carrying to every quarter of our vast domain the metals manufactured from the mines of Lake Superior. We have but to think of the capabilities of this region, its extent and area, the increase of population, the development of resources, the construction of railways, the growth of cities and towns; we have only to grasp the probabilities of the future, to discern the dawning commercial greatness of this section of our country. CHAPTER X. A FAMILIAR TALK. "I have called to have a little talk about the West, and think that I should like a farm in Minnesota or in the Red River country," said a gentleman not long since, who introduced himself as Mr. Blotter, and who said he was "clerking it." "I want to go out West and raise stock," said another gentleman who stopped me on the street. "Where would you advise a fellow to go who hasn't much money, but who isn't afraid to work?" said a stout young man from Maine. "I am a machinist, and want to try my luck out West," said another young man hailing from a manufacturing town in Massachusetts. "I am manufacturing chairs, and want to know if there is a place out West where I can build up a good business," said another.