He lived in one of the great cities in this country, the man who fell in love, and was in that city a character at least a little above the ordinary rut of men. He had talent and energy, and there had come to him a hard schooling in city ways, though he was born in the forest, and his youth had been passed upon a farm sloping downward to the shore of the St. Clair River, that wonderful strait and stretch of water which flows between broad meadowlands and wheat-fields and connects Lake Huron with the lower lake system, and itself becomes at last the huge St. Lawrence tumbling down into the Atlantic Ocean. Upon the St. Clair River now passes hourly, in long procession, the huge fleet of the lakes, the grain and ore laden crafts of Lake Superior, queer "whalebacks" and big propellers, and the vast fleet of merchantmen from Chicago and Milwaukee and other ports of the inland seas. The procession upon the watery blue ribbon a mile in width, stretching across the farm lands, is something not to be seen elsewhere upon the globe. The boats seen from a distance appear walking upon the land. Broad sails show white and startling against green groves upon the shore, and the funnels of steamers rear themselves like smoking stumps of big trees beyond a corn-field. Here passes a traffic greater in tonnage than that of the Suez Canal, of the Mersey, or even of the Thames. But it was not so when the man who fell in love was a boy. There were dense forests upon the river's banks then, and only sailing crafts and an occasional steamer passed, for that was half a century ago.