of two hundred and fifty miles to Lake Michigan. It is a fine stream, with a rapid current, but no "rapids," winding between wooded banks half a hundred feet below the general level of the country-side. Dams obstruct it at Niles, South Bend, Mishawaka, and above. Below the dam at South Bend, where nut trees, wild fruit trees, shrubs, and vines once grew in dense thicket, there are now a score of mills and factories. In early times small boats ran up the stream one hundred and seventy-five miles, but the river has long since been superseded as a highway by the railroads, two of the trunk-roads passing through the streets, and cross-roads connecting with twenty others. The country is almost level, there is little or no rock in place, forest and fine farms alternate, giving the landscape a park-like appearance.
The town lies on both sides of the river at its great south bend-hence the name-but is mainly on the west side. The mills are on the first "bottom;" five or six blocks on the second answer the present requirements of .business; the residences spread out thence a mile or so toward and upon a third terrace. The dwellings are in ample grounds, and are embowered in foliage in the sumThe people are plain and hospitable, simple in their manners and mode of life. The rich have risen to affluence by their own business sagacity, and there is no ostentation. The absence of display and pretence, and the repose in the social life of the place, give it a charm that will be sought in vain in most of our towns of its size and importance. The inhabitants number more thousands now than they did hundreds when the place first became the home of Schuyler Colfax. About half of them live by manufacturing. It is thus a modern town; the relations of labor and capital, transportation, tariff, the assimilation of foreigners, are the studies which it suggests to the thoughtful mind. Not a place for dreamers but for workers, the town and the man were congenial. The house in which he lived the last twenty years of his life is a square frame building of two stories, standing in a roomy lot, lawn set with forest trees in front, garden and fruit trees