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CASTLE NOWHERE

BY

CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON


Not many years ago the shore bordering the head of Lake Michigan, the
northern curve of that silver sea, was a wilderness unexplored. It is
a wilderness still, showing even now on the school-maps nothing save
an empty waste of colored paper, generally a pale, cold yellow
suitable to the climate, all the way from Point St. Ignace to the iron
ports on the Little Bay de Noquet, or Badderknock in lake phraseology,
a hundred miles of nothing, according to the map-makers, who, knowing
nothing of the region, set it down accordingly, withholding even those
long-legged letters, 'Chip-pe-was,' 'Ric-ca-rees,' that stretch
accommodatingly across so much townless territory farther west. This
northern curve is and always has been off the route to anywhere; and
mortals, even Indians, prefer as a general rule, when once started, to
go somewhere. The earliest Jesuit explorers and the captains of
yesterday's schooners had this in common, that they could not, being
human, resist a cross-cut; and thus, whether bark canoes of two
centuries ago or the high, narrow propellers of to-day, one and all,