s are established."

CHICAGO AND THE GREAT LAKES

After our friend Gunnar has seen as much as he wants of New York, he
obtains a good post in a large factory, but he stays there only two
months, for with other Swedes he receives an offer from Philadelphia
which he does not hesitate to accept. His idea is to work his way
gradually westward. If he can only get as far as Chicago he thinks it
will not be difficult to go on to San Francisco.

Now he works in a yard where more than a thousand locomotives are made
annually. This yard seems to him quite a town in itself. Here the iron
is made white hot in immense furnaces, there it is hammered and rolled,
and with irresistible power human hands convert the hard steel into
steam boilers, wheels, axles, and parts of machines which are put
together to form engines. The workshop is traversed in all directions by
rails, and the completed steam-horses are sent out all over the railway
systems of the United States.

Gunnar learns from his mates that Philadelphia is one of the largest
cities of the world, with nearly a million and a half inhabitants, and
that in America only New York and Chicago are larger.

* * * * *

After a while, however, Gunnar has had enough of Philadelphia, and takes
a ticket for Pittsburg, the steel and iron capital, where immigrants
never need be in want of a post. He travels without a change of
carriages between the two towns, traversing the whole of Pennsylvania.
Innumerable branch lines diverge in all directions, for towns and
villages are everywhere. Here a railway runs to a mine, there another to
a district rich in maize and tobacco, and here again a third to a timber
yard. At the station stand long trains laden with grain, planks,
petroleum, cotton, reaping machines, coal--in fact all the wares that
the earth can produce by its fertility, and men by the labour of their
hands.

The country becomes hilly, and the train winds about through the
northernmost part of the Alleghany Mountains. Gunnar lets his eyes rove
with strained attention over the dark woods, the waving fields, and the
smoke rising from villages and farmhouses, when an American comes and
sits down on the seat just in front of him.

"I see that you are a newcomer in America," says the stranger. "It may
then interest you to know that the crest of the Alleghany Mountains,
composed of granite, gneiss, and slates, is the watershed between the
Atlantic an