Still, Duluth will always seem to me like a city in a dream. On the
opposite, or Wisconsin shore of the lake, is Superior City, a pretty,
half-built town, rising slowly into commercial importance. Unfortunately
we were unable to cross to it.

I cannot leave Duluth without speaking of the "girls" in the hotel, as
they were called, in order not to wound the sensitive democracy of the
Yankee nature, which abhors the name of servant. There were three in the
great dining-saloon, whose superabundance of empty chairs and tables gave
even greater dreariness to the house than its long, empty corridors.
Pretty fair girls they were, neat in dress, but so tightly laced that it
was painful to look at them. Their slow, stiff, automatic movements were
suggestive of machinery, and in keeping with the sleepy spell cast over
the town. All the lithe, living gracefulness of their figures was
destroyed for the sake of drawing in an inch or two of belt. Watching
them, I attacked my breakfast with greater energy, to prove to myself
that there was something substantial about the premises.

One word respecting the treatment of luggage in that part of the world by
porters and officials, whose organ of destructiveness seems to be
abnormally developed. Boxes were thrown pell-mell into the hold, or
tossed on end out of high baggage-vans, with such unnecessary violence
that nothing less than cases of solid iron or stronger metal could have
stood it. Trunks, "stationary" boxes warranted to stand any ill-usage,
were cracked and broken; and the poor emigrants' boxes, of comparatively
slight construction, soon became a mass of ruins, with their contents
scattered on the ground. It was the same everywhere--at Duluth, at
Glyndon, and at Fisher's Landing, where we took the Red River boat. At
Glyndon half the baggage was piled on an open truck, and the heavy rain
we passed through that night completed the ruin the officials began. A