w whether you know Mariposa. If not, it is of no consequence,
for if you know Canada at all, you are probably well acquainted with a
dozen towns just like it.

There it lies in the sunlight, sloping up from the little lake that
spreads out at the foot of the hillside on which the town is built.
There is a wharf beside the lake, and lying alongside of it a steamer
that is tied to the wharf with two ropes of about the same size as they
use on the Lusitania. The steamer goes nowhere in particular, for the
lake is landlocked and there is no navigation for the Mariposa Belle
except to "run trips" on the first of July and the Queen's Birthday, and
to take excursions of the Knights of Pythias and the Sons of Temperance
to and from the Local Option Townships.

In point of geography the lake is called Lake Wissanotti and the river
running out of it the Ossawippi, just as the main street of Mariposa is
called Missinaba Street and the county Missinaba County. But these
names do not really matter. Nobody uses them. People simply speak of the
"lake" and the "river" and the "main street," much in the same way
as they always call the Continental Hotel, "Pete Robinson's" and the
Pharmaceutical Hall, "Eliot's Drug Store." But I suppose this is just
the same in every one else's town as in mine, so I need lay no stress on
it.

The town, I say, has one broad street that runs up from the lake,
commonly called the Main Street. There is no doubt about its width. When
Mariposa was laid out there was none of that shortsightedness which is
seen in the cramped dimensions of Wall Street and Piccadilly. Missinaba
Street is so wide that if you were to roll Jeff Thorpe's barber shop
over on its face it wouldn't reach half way across. Up and down the Main
Street are telegraph poles of cedar of colossal thickness, standing at a
variety of angles and carrying rather more wires than are commonly seen
at a transatlantic cable station.

On the Main Street itself are a number of buildings of extraordinary
importance,--Smith's Hotel and the Continental and the Mariposa House,
and the two banks (the Commercial and the Exchange), to say nothing of
McCarthy's Block (erected in 1878), and Glover's Hardware Store with the
Oddfellows' Hall above it. Then on the "cross" street that intersects
Missinaba Street at the main corner there is the Post Office and the
Fire Hall and the Young Men's Christian Association and the office of
the Mariposa Newspacket,--in fac