The things we do!

When the atom becomes practically fixed by
its environment, reposeful and stable, stratification sets in. We may or
we may not have then something better.
It may seem to you a far cry from those rough, lawless coureurs de bois to
the mobile but orderly people of that valley to-day. But after an
experience of a few summers ago the distance does not seem so great.
Here is a journal of three days:
In the morning of an August day I was gathering some last data from the
library of one of the greatest, though one of the newest, universities in
the world--a two-hours' journey from where the coureur de bois Jean
Nicolet, in robe of damask, first looked over the edge of the basin, (Not
many years ago I sat there in an assembly of learned men gathered from the
ends of the earth and arrayed in academic robes.) In the afternoon I
walked over that first and most famous of the French portages, but not
content with that, I walked on into the night along the Wisconsin, that I
might see the river as the explorers saw it.


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