some time on the great Western lakes. He was, indeed, one of those who first
carried the cockade of the republic, on those inland seas. This was pretty early
in the present century, when the navigation was still confined to the employment
of a few ships and schooners. Since that day, light may be said to have broken
into the wilderness, and the rays of the sun have penetrated to tens of
thousands of beautiful valleys and plains, that then lay in grateful shade.
Towns have been built along the whole of the extended line of coasts, and the
traveller now stops at many a place of ten or fifteen, and at one of even fifty,
thousand inhabitants, where a few huts then marked the natural sites of future
marts. In a word, though the scenes of this book are believed to have once been
as nearly accurate as is required by the laws which govern fiction, they are so
no longer. Oswego is a large and thriving town; Toronto and Kingston, on the
other side of the lake, compete with it; while Buffalo, Detroit, Cleveland,
Milwaukie, and Chicago, on the upper lakes, to say nothing of a hundred places
of lesser note, are fast advancing to the level of commercial places of great
local importance. In these changes, the energy of youth and abundance is quite
as much apparent as anything else; and it is ardently to be hoped that the
fruits of the gifts of a most bountiful Providence may not be mistaken for any
peculiar qualities in those who have been their beneficiaries. A just
appreciation of the first of these facts will render us grateful and meek; while
the vainglorious, who are so apt to ascribe all to themselves, will be certain
to live long enough to ascertain the magnitude of their error. That great
results are intended to be produced by means of these wonderful changes, we
firmly believe; but that they will prove to be the precise results now so
generally anticipated, in consulting the experience of the past, and taking the
nature of man into the account, the reflecting and intelligent may be permitted
to doubt.
    It may strike the novice as an anachronism, to place vessels on Ontario in
the middle of the eighteenth century; but, in this particular, facts will fully
bear out all the license of the fiction. Although the precise vessels mentioned
in these pages may never have existed on that water, or anywhere else, others so
nearly resembling them as to form a sufficient authority for their introduction
into a work of fiction, are known to have navigated that inland sea, even at a
period