The passenger steamers of the lakes are models of comfort, built more and more on the style, and even approximating the size of, the ocean liners, and after them there remains only one other type of vessel that deserves mention,--the ice-breaker. The situation of the Great Lakes on the extreme confines of the region whose climate makes it fit for the uses of civilized man keeps them ice-bound and closes their commerce for five months in the year. Early in April vessel owners begin to watch with interest the straits of Mackinac, Sault Ste. Marie, and Detroit. When the channel at Mackinac shows water instead of ice, navigation of the lakes has opened. Then strong ice-breakers force their way through the floating ice with a string of vessels at their sterns. They are powerful craft with a screw at the bow as well as at the stern, the first to suck the water from under the ice so that the boat climbing upon it may crush it down, breaking it and throwing it out of the way, and the second to propel the vessel through the two or three or even four feet of solid blue ice that have been broken in this way. This is an American invention which has been copied in all northern waters. Russia sent one of her foremost generals to study its construction, and it is now in use on her frozen lakes and seas. The tale of lake shipping is a tale that can only be begun in the limits of a single chapter. There are the car-ferries of Detroit, by which trains are carried across the river. These are now so crowded that a tunnel under the river is in process of construction to relieve the congestion. There are the stories of traffic at the “Soo” Canal, through which for six months of the year a big steamer passes in every fifteen minutes of the night and day, and of the Detroit River, with a record of a vessel every thirteen minutes, and of an average of two hundred tons of freight a minute for a season of two hundred and thirty days. There are the ship-building yards at Cleveland, where thirty-one steel freighters were ordered in a single winter, and more are turned out every year. The ships of the lakes are built on the lakes, and the shipyards are among the busiest centres of all that country. Lastly, there is the sad tale of wrecks and loss of lives, for since the first canoes were lost and the _Griffon_ and the _Walk-in-the-Water_ went down, the waters have exacted their annual toll, and fishing schooners and seven-thousand-ton freighters alike have broken in two or have foundered and been dashed to pieces on the rocks, while of the tale of hairbreadth escapes there is no end. Lake shipping within the limits of its own waterways has developed in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth is to come the connecting of the lakes with the Atlantic by canal and river, and the story of the twentieth century will be of vessels going direct from the ports of the Great Lakes to the ports of the Old World. With this prophecy the tale would seem to be complete.