pass their troubled waters.

Then America and Canada began to build canals and locks to link the
great lakes, in spite of the Rapids, and "Soo" woke. It has been awake
and living since that moment. It has been playing lock against lock
with the Michigan men across the river, each planning cunningly to
establish a system that will carry the long lake vessels not only in
locks befitting their size, but in locks that can be handled more
swiftly than those of the rival.

At the moment the prize is with Canada. It has a lock nine hundred
feet long, and can do the business of lowering a great vessel from
Superior to Huron with one action, where America uses four locks. The
Americans have a larger lock than the Canadian, but the Canadians are
quicker.

And this means something. The traffic on these lakes is greater than
the traffic on many seas. Down this vast water highway come the narrow
pencils of lake-boats carrying grain and ore and lumber in hulls that
are all hold. They come and go incessantly. "Soo," indeed, handles
about three times the tonnage of Suez yearly, and there is the American
side to add to that.

With this brisk movement of commercial life within her, "Soo" has
thrived like a cold. Where, in the old days, the local inhabitants
could be reckoned on the fingers of two hands, there is now a city of
about twenty thousand, and it is still growing. It is a city of
graceful streets and neat houses climbing over the Laurentine Hills
that make the site. It is breezy and self-assured, and draws its
comfortable affluence from its shipping, its paper-mills, its steel
works, as well as from lumber, agriculture and other industries.

It met the Prince as becomes a youth of promise. Crowds massed on the
lawns before the red sandstone station, and in all the streets there
were crowds. And crowds followed his every movement, however swift it
was, for "Soo" has the automobile fever as badly as any other town in
Canada, and car owners packed their families, even to the youngest in
arms, into tonneaux and joined a procession a mile long, that followed
the Prince about the town.

It is true that some of the crowd was America out to look at Royalty.
Americans were not slow to make the most of the fact that they were to
have a Prince across the river. From early morning the ferry that runs
from Michigan to the British Empire was packed with Republican autos
and Republicans on foot, all eager to be there when