most of Chicago’s enterprises. The Board of Trade is one of the most remarkable sights in the country. Its public galleries are usually filled with spectators of the feverish bidding of the grain operators, whose slightest nod affects the markets of the world. The Stock Exchange is yearly taking a more important share in the money market. The financial institutions of Chicago and the West have more than once saved the East from impending panic, and immense loans are constantly being renewed, insuring the speedy recognition of the city as a force in the money markets of the nations.

More interesting is the honor-roll of Chicago’s intellectual enterprise. The Columbian World’s Fair of 1893 astonished the world with its beauty, its perfection of artistic skill and taste. It gave an impetus to the pursuit of the beautiful and refining which has borne substantial results. Near the site of the Fair is a cluster of buildings constituting the University of Chicago, dating from 1891, to which a single donor has given nine million dollars, and loyal citizens are continually adding to its possessions. The heads of the University count on an endowment fund of fifty millions. Nowhere is Chicago enthusiasm for progress more finely manifested than here. The great public libraries of the city are envied by foreign visitors. The central Public Library is a splendid triumph of architecture, next in interior elegance to the Library of Congress. It is valued at three millions, exclusive of its books. The Newberry and Crerar libraries form special branches of the system. The city’s churches and charities are doing nobly in ameliorating the condition of the toilers and the handicapped in life’s race. The name and fame of Miss Jane Addams and the Hull House settlement are world-wide. How difficult the task is may be conceived from the fact that out of a million and seven hundred thousand people in the city, nine hundred thousand are Americans, German, and Irish; the remainder represent twenty-four nationalities, exclusive of negroes. A report issued by an investigating committee of Hull House states that “the density of population in the Polish quarter in Chicago is three times that of the most crowded portions of Tokio, Calcutta, and many other Asiatic cities.”

As in New York there is a marked tendency among the richer people to set up country homes. New suburban towns and villages of great attractiveness are drawing an increasing number away from the smoky city. On the other hand the far-famed hospitality of its people to prophets of every school of thought, and the spirit of enterprise which welcomes every new idea, attracts eccentrics and adventurers whose trumpetings are loud enough to mislead superficial observers into the notion that Chicago is the crank’s paradise. If a fault at all, this amiable toleration leans to virtue’s side. Rightly to appreciate the depth and breadth of Chicago’s influence we must follow its trade to the remotest corners of the earth. We must trace the influences of its seats of learning and refinement. We must count, if we can, the tremendous results of its world-renowned enterprises that have stimulated nations to follow the successful lead. Be its faults what they may, Chicago has the heart, the will, and the muscle to mend them, as the world will see, and then will the true greatness of the Western metropolis be discerned, and its full influence be felt.

WINNIPEG LAKE AND RIVER.

W. F. BUTLER.

The chief gave a signal, and a hundred trading guns were held aloft, and a hundred shots rang out on the morning air. Again and again the salutes were repeated, the whole tribe moving down to the water’s edge to see me off. Putting out to the middle of the river, I discharged my fourteen-shooter into the air in rapid succession; a prolonged war-whoop answered my salute, and, paddling their very best, for the eyes of the finest canoers were upon them, my men drove the little craft flying over the water until the Indian village and its still firing braves were hidden behind a river bend. Through many marsh-lined channels, and amidst a vast sea of reeds and rushes, the Red River of the North seeks the water of Lake Winnipeg. A mixture of land and water, of mud, and of the varied vegetation which grows thereon, this delta of the Red River is, like other spots of a similar description, inexplicably lonely.

The wind sighs over it, bending the tall weeds with mournful rustle, and the wild bird passes and repasses with plaintive cry over the rushes which form his summer home.

Emerging from the sedges of the Red River, we shot out into the waters of an immense lake,—a lake which stretched away into unseen spaces, and over whose waters the fervid July sun was playing strange freaks of mirage and inverted shore-land.

This was Lake Winnipeg,—a great lake, even on a continent where lakes are inland seas. But vast as it is now, it is only a tithe of what it must have been in the earlier ages of the earth.

The capes and headlands of what once was a vast inland sea now stand far away from the shores of Winnipeg. Hundreds of miles from its present limits these great landmarks still look down on the ocean, but it is an ocean of grass. The waters of Winnipeg have retired from their feet, and they are now mountain-ridges, rising over seas of verdure. At the bottom of this by-gone lake lay the whole valley of the Red River, the present Lakes Winnepegoos and Manitoba, and the prairie islands of the Lower Assiniboine,—one hundred thousand square miles of water. The water has long since been drained off by the lowering of the rocky channels leading to Hudson Bay, and the bed of the extinct lake now forms the richest prairie-land in the world.

But although Winnipeg has shrunken to a tenth of its original size, its rivers still remain worthy of the great basin into which they once flowed. The Saskatchewan is longer than the Danube, the Winnipeg has twice the volume of the Rhine. Four hundred thousand square miles of continent shed their waters into Lake Winnipeg; a lake as changeful as the ocean, but, fortunately for us, in its very calmest mood to-day. Not a wave, not a ripple on its surface, not a breath of breeze to aid the untiring paddles. The little canoe, weighed down by men and provisions, had scarcely three inches of its gunwale over the water, and yet the steersman held his course far out into the glassy waste, leaving behind the marshy headlands which marked the river’s mouth.

A long low point stretching from the south shore of the lake was faintly visible on the horizon. It was past mid-day when we reached it; so, putting in among the rocky boulders which lined the shore, we lighted our fire and cooked our dinner. Then, resuming our way, the Grand Traverse was entered upon. Far away over the lake arose the point of the Big Stone, a lonely cape whose perpendicular front was raised high above the water. The sun began to sink towards the west; but still not a breath rippled the surface of the lake, not a sail moved over the wide expanse, all was as lonely as though our tiny craft had been the sole speck of life on the waters of the world. The red sun sank into the lake, warning us that it was time to