lightest summer dresses, we were uncomfortably warm--and this with miles
of ice around us! The warm land-breeze, and our captain's promptitude and
determination, enabled us to reach Duluth that evening. A change of wind
the same night drove the ice back into the bay, and from the hotel
windows we saw and commiserated four vessels locked fast, their crews and
passengers suffering from cold and short rations for four days. The
change of wind made us glad of our fur jackets.

Duluth, situated on the rocky north, or Minnesota, shore of the extreme
western end of Lake Superior--otherwise St. Louis Bay--was apparently
planned in expectation of its one day becoming the principal centre of
commerce between America and Canada--in short, the great capital of the
lakes. Everything is on a large scale. The streets are broad; the wharves
and warehouses extensive; the hotels immense; the custom-house and other
public buildings massive and capacious enough to accommodate any number
of extra clerks when the rush of business shall come--a rush which is
still in the future. During the day and a half we spent there, the hotel
omnibus and one other team were the only locomotives, and a lame man and
a water-carrier with a patch over his eye the only dwellers in Duluth we
saw; while the people from our boat seemed to be the only visitors who
woke the echoes in the sleepy place. It was like a city in a fairy tale,
over which a spell had been cast; its very cleanliness was depressing,
and so suggestive of disuse, that I think a mass of mud scraped off the
road might have given some appearance of traffic and life to the scene.

There _are_ people in Duluth, however, though it is difficult to say
where they hide themselves; for some of our party went to service in a
little church on a hill, and came back charmed with the eloquence of the
clergyman and the sweetness of the voices in the quartette choir, to say
nothing of several pretty girls they noticed amongst the congregation.