rd 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.

The man who was to fall in love, as will be told, had, in the whirl of
city life, almost forgotten the sturdy days when he was a youngster in
the little district school, when at other times he rode a mare dragging
an old-fashioned "cultivator," held by his father between the corn rows,
and when the little farm hewed out of the woodland had yet stumps on
every acre, when "loggings" and "raisings" drew the pioneers together,
and when he, one of the first-born children of that region, had fled for
comfort in every boyish strait to a gentle, firm-faced woman who was his
mother. He had, with manhood, drifted to the city, and had become one of
the city's cream in all acuteness and earnestness and what makes the
pulse of life, when thousands and tens and hundreds of thousands
congregate to live together in one vast hive. He was a man of affairs, a
man of the world, easily at home among traders and schemers for money,
at a political meeting, at a banquet, or in society. Sometimes, in the
midst of things, would float before his eyes a vision of woods, of dark
soil, of a buckwheat field, of