a far more meagre vocabulary than did those of either of their neighbors, the Chippeways and the Sacs and Foxes. The word mini, which forms the introductory syllables to so many geographical names, means "water." Sometimes it appears as misi, or mizi. No wonder this word occurs so frequently. The map of this region is as speckled with lakes and marshes and streams as any map could be and call itself dry land. It is true that Itaska Lake is the actual source of the Father of Waters, to which it can be directly traced; but a thousand-yes, ten thousand -ponds, swamps, and springs feed its slender stream long before it comes down to where it is of any use. This accounts for the strength and constancy of the Mississippi. It drains an immense area of small water-courses, singly insignificant, but unitedly furnishing an immense volume. This makes the Father of Waters the son of innumerable forgotten parents, and he is bred no baby rivulet, but a young Hercules-a strong stream holding his own from the moment he sets forth. St. Paul was not a bad name for the settlement down the river, but in view of the aqueous region I have described, the town above was also well called Minneapolis-a city of waters. It stands upon the high ground which rises into a ridge where St. Anthony's cataract breaks into dissolving foam, and then sweeps down in a deep and eddying current between lofty banks to its further course below. Opposite are the straggling village and factories of the town of St. Anthony, whose great expectations are, I fear, quenched by its more successful vis-à-vis, and the suburbs and farms extend far up and down on either side. A little beyond it sparkles one of the most exquisite of Minnesota's waterfalls-Silver Cascade. Spanning the river at the city stands a magnificent suspension - bridge of iron, whose graceful length adds greatly to the picturesque effect, and contributes to the commercial convenience in a way hard to appreciate until you have passed a winter there, and have seen the ice break up in the spring. Ferriage was a very uncertain, not to say perilous, expedient, which the high bridge has done away with. The bridge stands just about opposite the centre of the city, and continues out into the air one of her principal business streets. | making in his new "A" mill, which is said Underneath it are the railway tracks that to be the largest in the world, except one run to the northward, and also serve the at Buda-Pesth. extensive lumber yards above, while below is the great railway freight yard, and the mills that form the city's source of wealth. Minneapolis is now a town of some 50,000 people; she is growing rapidly, and, I think, in a healthy way. Her natural advantages of location are very great, both for business purposes and as a place of residence, and she has a rich farming region developing with surprising strides to give a market to her wares in exchange for its crops and animal products. Minneapolis is known not only in the United States, but widely out of it, for The wheat to feed this mill, as well as all its neighbors, comes chiefly from the Red River region, where are those township-wide farms that have been so often described of late. The receipts at Minneapolis from June, 1879, to June, 1880, were 8,103,710 bushels. As only 80,000 bushels were shipped away during that time, it appears that over 8,000,000 bushels were turned into flour here. When the wheat comes in it is unloaded from the cars, by the aid of steam-shovels, into a hopper bin, whence it is elevated to the fifth floor and fed into a its grist-milling indus- falls. It seems incredible that away MILLS AT MINNEAPOLIS. receiving bin, the bottom of which extends down to the fourth floor. Out of this it empties itself into conveyers, consisting of small buckets travelling upon an endless belt, and is taken to storage bins on the first and second floors. Here it rests until wanted for milling. When this time comes the wheat travels by conveyers to the top (eighth) floor, whence it is fed down into the grain separators in the story beneath, which sift out the chaff, straw, and other foreign matter. This done, it descends another story upon patented grading screens, which sort out the larger-sized grains from the smaller, the latter falling through the meshes of the screen, after which the selected portion drops into the cockles on the floor beneath, and, these escaped, falls still further into the Brush machines. All this time the wheat remains wheat-the kernel is entire. Its next move, however, begins its destruction, for now the ending-stones are encountered, which break the germinal point off each grain. This matter accomplished, the wheat is shot away up to the attic again, and traversing the whole length of the mill, falls into an aspirator on the seventh floor, having passed which, it slides down to the second floor, and is sent through the corrugated rollers. These rollers have shallow grooves cut spirally upon them, with rounded ridges between. The opposing rollers are grooved in an opposite direction, and it is impossible for a grain of wheat to get through without being cracked in two, though the rollers are not sufficiently near together to do much more than that. It comes out of this ordeal looking as though mice had chewed it, and pouring into special conveyers, speedily finds itself up on the seventh floor again, where the flour dust which has been produced by this rough handling is bolted out in reels, and all that is left-no longer wheat-is divided into "middlings" and "tailings." The tailings consist of the hard seed case and the refuse part, and go into market as "feed" and "bran," while the middlings are reserved for further perfection into flour; they are the starchy, good centres of the grains. The first operation toward this end is the grading of the middlings, for which purpose they pass upon silken sieves arranged in narrow horizontal troughs, and given a gentle shaking motion by machinery. There is a succession of these bolting-cloths, so that the middlings pass through ten gradings. Next, they go to a series of purifiers, which resemble fanning-machines, and thence to corrugated rollers, each successive set of which are more closely apposed, where the meal is be removed in order to make the flour of | moved every morning. In addition to the best quality. And hereby hangs a tale of considerable interest to Minneapolis men. In the old mill which not long ago occupied the site of this new one there stood upon one side the usual rows of buhrs, in this case twenty in number. Through the these small chambers there were several purifiers on the upper floors that discharged their dust right out into the room. The atmosphere of the whole mill thus became surcharged with exceedingly minute and fuzzy particles, which are very inflammable, and when mixed in certain Minneapolis is reported to ship annually, beyond her local consumption, 1,650,850 barrels of flour. "These," says the Tribune's statistician, "if piled one above the other, end to end, would reach 780 miles. The flour would make about 495,255,000 loaves of bread the ordinary size of bakers' loaves. These piled in a pyramid would make, roughly calculated, a square pyramid with a base 300 feet square and with a height of nearly 1000 feet." Down the river from Minneapolis are several other towns-Winona (near which stands the remarkable Sugar-loaf Mounttain sketched by the artist), Red Wing, La Crosse, and others. These towns are only smaller communities of the same type as their more populous rivals, and need no special description. proportions with the air, highly explosive. The good that came out of this seemingly wholly harmful episode, which scratched an end-mark to one era of the city's prosperity, was the introduction into the new mills of a system of dust-saving that renders such a calamity improbable if not impossible in future. Now, instead of being thrown abroad into a large room, the dust is discharged by suction fans into close fire-proof receivers, where it accumulates in great quantities, and is sold as a low grade of flour. This dust having been removed, what remains is the best quality of flour. It is barrelled by the aid of a machine permitting the precise weight of 196 pounds to be determined, packed, and branded with great speed. Bakers, however, use what is known as "wheat" or "straight" flour, which is the product of the five reductions, all the subsequent processes through which the middlings pass in making fine flour being omitted. "Fancy" flour differs from the ordinary superfine in that the middlings are ground through smooth rollers. Next to her vast and all-important flouring interests, Minneapolis controls immense dealings in lumber. Along the river up above town you can nowhere approach the margin except by climbing over or crawling among piles of planks and scantling; and when you have got down to the edge of the bank, you can scarcely find any river for the abundance of pine logs crowded upon its hidden surGreat forests stretch over a wide country along the Upper Mississippi-forests as dense and forbidding in a large portion of their extent as those of the Dismal Swamp-where tamarack and much other worthless underbrush stand in the dark water and make the jungle all but impenetrable. Scattered throughout this expanse of wilderness, however, in little groves or singly, are the noble masts and lesser trunks which in winter are cut, hauled, and floated to the river, and at the spring high water are sent down in huge rafts to the booms above the falls. Some of the rafts pass the city, but the majority of them are moored and sawed above. Those rafts that shoot the falls or originate below them glide down the quiet current of the Mississippi through scenes of ever-changing and radiant beauty. As you watch them floating almost motionless on the glassy expanse of Lake Pepin, transfigured in the misty sunsets of the time of corn-stacking, you find it hard to realize that this intensely golden and poetic atmosphere surrounds facts so prosaic. Reports for 1880 show that about 12,000,000 feet of sawed lumber were sent out of Minneapolis every thirty days, or nearly 150,000,000 feet a year. This would |