complacently.

"You hard, cold utilitarian!" exclaimed the Historian; "who cares
anything about that? It is the romance of the thing that would charm
me."

"And the romance consists in its being distant. We always talk of the
good old times as though they were really any better than our own age!
It is a beautiful delusion. Don't you know how in walking the shady
places are always behind us?"

The Historian's only answer to this banter was to shrug his shoulders
scornfully and to light a fresh cigar.

Lake Erie is about two hundred and forty miles in length and has a mean
breadth of forty miles. Its surface is three hundred and thirty feet
above Lake Ontario, and five hundred and sixty-five above the level of
the sea. It receives the waters of the upper lakes by means of the
Detroit River, and discharges them again by the Niagara into Lake
Ontario. Lake Erie has a shallow depth, but Ontario, which is five
hundred and two feet deep, is two hundred and thirty feet below the tide
level of the ocean, or as low as most parts of the Gulf of St. Lawrence,
and the bottoms of Lakes Huron, Michigan, and Superior, although their
surface is much higher, are all, from their vast depths, on a level with
the bottom of Ontario. Now, as the discharge through Detroit River,
after allowing all the probable portion carried off by evaporation, does
not appear by any means equal to the quantity of water which the other
three lakes receive, it has been conjectured that a subterranean river
may run from Lake Ontario. This conjecture is not improbable, and
accounts for the singular fact that salmon and herring are caught in all