A Trip to Manitoba | Page 7

the possibility of failure in hitting the one open passage lent
the additional charm of uncertainty to our voyage; not charming,
however, to the poor emigrants whose stock of provisions was too
scanty to admit of a long stay on board, while the commissariat of the
steamer was not prepared to supply them. Knowing this, the captain--a
pleasant, handsome man--quoting the saying that "Fortune favours the
brave," put on steam.
By eight o'clock on Sunday morning we had met great blocks of ice,
and grown accustomed to hearing them bump against the side of the
boat; and before noon we were well into the icefields, with loose blocks
of ice on every side, and a rough surface of piled-up masses as far as
the eye could see. Up a narrow strip of blue water we steamed, the
passage closing in our wake. Then the way became blocked ahead,
while the vessel heeled to one side with a lurch, as a great block went
under her keel. The captain held on steadily but slowly, stopping the
machinery until a large berg was passed, and taking advantage of an
opening created by the waves as they bore the floes upon their crests.
As the ice-blocks closed in behind us the certainty of being unable to
return, and the difficulty of going ahead, gave increased excitement to
our adventure.
One of its strangest features was the heat. Though clothed in the
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.
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