canal barges jostle the
lumber-raft half a mile long as it snakes across the water in tow of a
launch, and earth, and sky, and sea alike are thick with smoke.

In the old days, before the railway ran into the city, all the business
quarters fringed the lake-shore where the traffic was largest. To-day
the business quarters have gone up-town to meet the railroad; the lake
traffic still exists, but you shall find a narrow belt of red-brick
desolation, broken windows, gap-toothed doors, and streets where the
grass grows between the crowded wharves and the bustling city. To the
lake front comes wheat from Chicago, lumber, coal, and ore, and a large
trade in cheap excursionists.

It was my felicity to catch a grain steamer and an elevator emptying
that same steamer. The steamer might have been two thousand tons burden.
She was laden with wheat in bulk; from stem to stern, thirteen feet
deep, lay the clean, red wheat. There was no twenty-five per cent dirt
admixture about it at all. It was wheat, fit for the grindstones as it
lay. They manoeuvred the fore-hatch of that steamer directly under an
elevator--a house of red tin a hundred and fifty feet high. Then they
let down into that fore-hatch a trunk as if it had been the trunk of an
elephant, but stiff, because it was a pipe of iron-champed wood. And
the trunk had a steel-shod nose to it, and contained an endless chain of
steel buckets.

Then the captain swore, raising his eyes to heaven, and a gruff voice
answered him from the place he swore at, and certain machinery, also in
the firmament, began to clack, and the glittering, steel-shod nose of
that trunk burrowed into the wheat, and the wheat quivered and sunk
upon the instant as water sinks when the siphon sucks, because the steel
buckets within the trunk were flying upon their endless round, carrying
away each its appointed morsel of wheat.

The elevator was a Persian well wheel--a wheel squashed out thin
and cased in a pipe, a wheel driven not by bullocks, but by much
horse-power, licking up the grain at the rate of thou-sands of
bushels the hour. And the wheat sunk into the fore-hatch while a man
looked--sunk till the brown timbers of the bulkheads showed bare, and
men leaped down through clouds of golden dust and shovelled the wheat
furiously round the nose of the trunk, and got a steam-shovel of
glittering steel and made that shovel also, till there remained of the
grain not more than a horse leaves in the fold of