Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/218

Rh lake; its billows, however, now resembled naiads sporting in the sunshine.

“Erie,” says M. Bouchette, a French writer, describing this part of the country, “may be regarded as the great central reservoir from which canals extend on all sides, so that vessels from this point may go to every part of the country inland, from the Atlantic Ocean on the east and north, to the countries and the sea of the south, and bring together the productions of every land and climate.” Emigrants of all nations cross Lake Erie on their way to the colonies west of those great inland seas. But to too many of them has Erie proved a grave. Not long since a vessel of emigrants, mostly Germans, was destroyed by fire on Lake Erie, and hundreds of these poor people found a grave in its waters. Among those who were taken up were seven or eight couples, locked in each other's arms. Death could not divide them. Love is stronger than death. The helmsman stood at the helm steering the vessel towards land till the flames burned his hands. The negligence of the captain is said to have been the cause of this misfortune. He too perished. Only between thirty and forty passengers were saved.

For me, however, the sail across Lake Erie was like a sunbright festival, in that magnificent steamer where even a piano was heard in the crowded saloon, and where a polite and most agreeable captain took charge of me in the kindest manner. My good old pioneer related to me various incidents of his life, his religious conversion, his first love and his last, which was quite recent; the old gentleman declaring himself to be half in love with “that Yankee-woman, Mrs. L.;” and I do not wonder at it. It convinced me that he had good taste. He declared himself to be “first and foremost a great ladies-man.”

At four o'clock in the afternoon—that is to say, of the day after we went on board, we reached Detroit, a