All day we basked in the sunshine on the captain's bridge. Think of being
glad to bask in the sunshine on a 4th of August! Between Marquette and
Portage River we passed but one house,--one solitary, lonely house, set on
the very edge of the "unsalted sea;" before it a vast expanse of limitless
waters, behind it an unbroken, limitless forest; no fields, no crops, no
roads, only space enough cleared for the tiny cabin and tinier shed. What
had lured people there? What kept them alive? No neighbors, no mail, no
farm, no apparent object in life, and only one small rowboat to get away
in.

Yet they had put a curtain up at the window! No human being could by any
possibility look in at that window. Even the curtain could only be
detected with an opera-glass from the steamer that passed twice a week.
But the sweet instinct of privacy and home had had its way, and every
night the little curtain that never shut out anything but the incurious
moonlight or the innocent stars was drawn as regularly as the shades of a
Fifth Avenue mansion. Later we learned that it was the Life-Saving Station
of Lake Superior.

"No nap this afternoon, ladies," said the captain as he left the
luncheon-table. "You must be on the lookout for Portage River."

All the afternoon we watched for the little river, eked out by a canal,
that enables us to cut off one hundred and twenty miles of what would be
the course around Keweena Point, besides giving what is perhaps the most
interesting part of the whole trip. So narrow is the opening of the river
that no trace of it is to be seen till we are close upon it; yet swift as
the dove from far Palmyra flying, unerring as an arrow from the bow, the
great ship sweeps across the lake to exactly the right spot. The river is