"the Farmer Is of More Consequence Tiian the Farm, and Should Be First Improved."

While the busy world is engaged upon the schemes of the future, the mind of the aged reverts to the memory of the past. Sixty years ago, one bright day in September, 1S35, two young men clad in homespun, with calloused hands and sunburned visages, walked across a plank from the dock at Buffalo to the deck of a staunch Lake Erie steamboat. Their destiny was the fapoff territory of Michigan. They were charged with the responsible duty of seeking out a home for a numerous family, of which they constituted a part. No railroad then extend«*} as far west as the Great Lakes. A line, which afterward became the New York Central, extended from Albany to Attica, a point 35 miles east of Buffalo. It was owned and controlled by six different railroad companies, and when, soon after it was extended to Buffalo, the passenger over it had to change cars seven times, and pay his fare and change baggage as often, in traveling from Lake Erie to the Hudson. But even this was considered a great improvement upon the Erie canal packets, which just ten years earlier had supplanted the stage coaches, which in the days of my boyhood filed along the old Buffalo road. Well, as the third day neared its close our voyagers stepped gladly from the steamboat onto a dock of Detroit, a frontier city containing not far from three thousand inhabitants. They were of all shades of color, from the fair haired Caucasian to the blackest sons of Africa. But the Frenchmen, with all shades of '̂ likftan blood intermingled; seemed txrfce in the greatest numbers. There was an occasional stage between Detroit and Pontiac, by way of Koyal Oak and Birmingham, or Piety Hill, as it was then called. But our voyagers were good pedestrians, and, glad to get rid of the stifling greasy air of the steamboat, struck boldly out along the low sunken road, where Woodward avenue now stretches its miles of buildings toward Pontiac, passing which we, (for the pilgrims were Moses and Enos Goodrich,) pushed forward along the Saginaw road, which the general government had opened to a point somewhere in Genesee county, near Flint river. As we moved onward we frequently met men returning from their explorations to the frontier, and as we all seemed weary enough to sit down on a log or a mossy bank and rest, we sought information, which they seemed as anxious to impart as we were to receive. They told us of a country about Davison's Mill where good government land could be found in abundance.