"'Lakeman!--Buffalo! Pray, what is a Lakeman, and where is Buffalo?'
said Don Sebastian, rising in his swinging mat of grass.
"On the eastern shore of our Lake Erie, Don; but--I crave
your courtesy--may be, you shall soon hear further of all that.
Now, gentlemen, in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships,
well nigh as large and stout as any that ever sailed out of your
old Callao to far Manilla; this Lakeman, in the land-locked heart
of our America, had yet been nurtured by all those agrarian
freebooting impressions popularly connected with the open ocean.
For in their interflowing aggregate, those grand fresh-water seas
of ours,--Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,--
possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean's
noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and
of climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles,
even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by two
great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long
maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East,
dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon
by batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw;
they have heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories; at intervals,
they yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted
faces flash from out their peltry wigwams; for leagues and leagues
are flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where the gaunt
pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic genealogies;
those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken
creatures whose exported furs give robes to Tartar Emperors;
they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as
Winnebago villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship,
the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the beech canoe;
they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful
as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are,
for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned
full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew.
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