Pictures of Canadian Life: A Record of Actual Experiences
Date: 2012-02-13T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Canada -- Emigration and immigration; Canada -- Description and travel

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Title: Pictures of Canadian Life: A Record of Actual Experiences

Author: J. Ewing Ritchie

Release date: February 13, 2012 [eBook #38858]

Language: English

Credits: Transcribed from the 1886 T. Fisher Unwin edition by David Price

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PICTURES OF CANADIAN LIFE: A RECORD OF ACTUAL EXPERIENCES ***

Transcribed from the 1886 T. Fisher Unwin edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

Note to page 56.

Sir Charles Tupper tells me that I was totally misinformed.  I am sorry to have been led astray, and have pleasure in making the correction, which was received, unfortunately, after the chapter had been worked off.

PICTURES
of
CANADIAN LIFE

A Record of Actual Experiences

by
J. EWING RITCHIE
author of ‘east anglia,’ ‘british senators,’ ‘on the
track of the pilgrim fathers,’ etc., etc.

WITH TWELVE ILLUSTRATIONS

London
t. fisher unwin
26, paternoster square
1886.

CONTENTS.

chapter

page

I.

Introductory.—Canadian Territory and Population

1

II.

Off With The Emigrants—The Voyage Out—The ‘Sarnia’—The Cod-Fishery

16

III.

Arrival at Quebec

33

IV.

At Montreal, and on to Ottawa—Interviewing and Interviewed

45

V.

Toronto—The Town—The People—Canadian Authors—The Leader of the Opposition

74

VI.

Off to the North-West—Niagara—Lake Superior—The Canadian Pacific Railway—At Winnipeg

104

VII.

Life on the Prairie

148

VIII.

Amongst the Cow-Boys

174

IX.

In the Rockies—Holt City—Life in the Camp—A Rough Ride—The Kicking Horse Lake—British Columbia

194

X.

Dangers of the Rockies—Prairie Fires—The Return—Port Arthur—Emigrants

225

XI.

Back to England—Canadian Hospitality—The ‘Assyrian Monarch’—Home

245

XII.

Colonization in Canada

255

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

page

Dr. Barnardo’s Distributing Home for Children, Peterborough, Ontario

Frontispiece

Falls of Montmorenci—Quebec—Junction of the River Ottawa and St. Lawrence, Montreal

48

King Street, Toronto

78

Second Year on a Prairie Farm, Canadian North-West

134

Calico Island, Saskatchewan River, Canadian North-West

135

Hunting Scene on the Souris River

145

Souris Valley, Manitoba

147

Pioneer Store at Brandon in 1882

162

Harvesting on the Bell Farm—Indian Head, N.W.T.

172

Mount Stephen in the Rocky Mountains, On the Line of the Canadian Pacific Railway

197

Thunder Bay, Lake Superior

242

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.—CANADIAN TERRITORY AND POPULATION.

Lunching one day in Toronto with one of the aldermen of that thriving city (I may as well frankly state that we had turtle-soup on the occasion), he remarked that he had been in London the previous summer, and that he was perfectly astonished at the idea Englishmen seemed to have about Canada.  He was particularly indignant at the way in which it was coolly assumed that the Canadians were a barbarous people, planted in a wilderness, ignorant of civilization, deficient in manners and customs—a well-meaning people, of whom in the course of ages something might be made, but at present in a very nebulous and unsatisfactory state.  It seems my worthy friend had gone to hear a popular Q.C.—a gentleman of Liberal proclivities, very anxious to write M.P. after his name—deliver a lecture to the young men of the Christian Association in Exeter Hall on Canada.  Never was a man more mortified in all his life than was the alderman in question.  All the time the lecture was being delivered, he said, he held down his head in shame.  ‘I felt,’ said he, rising to a climax, ‘as if I must squirm!’  What ‘squirming’ implies the writer candidly admits that he has no idea.  Of course, it means something very bad.  All he can say is, that it is his hope and prayer that in the following pages he may set no Canadian squirming.  He went out to see the nakedness, or the reverse, of the land, to ask the emigrants how they were getting on, to judge for himself whether it was worth any Englishman’s while to leave home and friends to cross the Atlantic and plant himself on the vast extent of prairie stretching between Winnipeg and the Rocky Mountains.  What he heard and saw is contained in the following pages, originally published in the Christian World, and now reproduced as a small contribution to a question which rises in importance with the increase of population and the growing difficulty of getting a living at home.

As a rule, the English know little more of Canada than that it belongs to us—that it is very cold there in winter and very hot in summer.  I happened to be on board the Worcester training-ship on the last occasion of the prizes being given away, and was not surprised to find that Canada was especially referred to as illustrating the defective geographical knowledge of the young cadets.  In the London Citizen a few weeks later there was still grosser display of ignorance on the part of a writer who had gone to Montreal to attend the meetings of the British Association there, and who complained bitterly of the lack of garden-parties and champagne lunches.  This victim of misplaced confidence owned that he had to put up with tea and coffee and non-intoxicating beverages when he did so far condescend as to accept Canadian hospitality.  Yet the writer of that letter was a barrister, at this very time a candidate for Parliament.  Had he an atom of common-sense, he might have known—this distinguished barrister and ornament of the British Association for the Advancement of Science—that Canada is a young country; that its wealth is still undeveloped; that the greater part of it is prairie; that the settler—in his heroic efforts to subdue Nature, to make the wilderness to rejoice and blossom as the rose, to build up a grand nation in that quarter of the globe, to spread in a region larger than the United States the Anglo-Saxon laws and civilization and tongue—has to renounce luxury, to scorn delights, to live laborious days.  Canada is not the place for members of the British Association who long for the flesh-pots of Egypt or the champagne-cup.  In Canada one has to live simply and to work hard.  He who does so work, though in England he may die a pauper, there becomes a man.  Canada offers to all independence, a fertile soil, a bracing air.  At present there is little chance of the majority of its people being enervated by luxury or demoralized by wealth.

Canada is a country, however, with room and scope for millions who must starve and die in Europe.  Its area is 3,470,392 square miles, and its most southern point reaches the 42nd parallel of latitude.  It possesses thousands of square miles of the finest forests on the continent, widely spread coal fields, extensive and productive fisheries, and rivers and lakes of unequalled extent.  The country is divided into eight provinces, as follows: Nova Scotia, containing 20,907 square miles; New Brunswick, 27,174; Prince Edward Island, 2,133; Quebec, 188,688; Ontario, 101,733; Manitoba, 123,200; the North West, 2,665,252; British Columbia, 341,305.  Newfoundland lies outside the Dominion, for reasons best known to itself.

According to the census taken in 1881, the population at that time numbered 4,324,810, distributed as follows: Nova Scotia, 440,572; New Brunswick, 321,233; Prince Edward Island, 108,891; Quebec, 1,359,027; Ontario, 1,923,228; Manitoba, 65,954; the North West, 56,446; British Columbia, 49,459.  These figures must be much added to if we would get an idea of the growth of population, especially in the North West, which has increased by leaps and bounds.  Up to 1870 it was as it had been since the charter of Charles II.—the happy hunting-ground of the Hudson Bay Company.  As late as 1870 it had no railway communication, no towns or villages, few post-offices, and no telegraph.  There must be a million of people settled there by this time, and yet it is a wilderness almost untrod by man.  The origins of the populations are returned as follows: 891,248 English and Welsh; 957,408 Irish; 699,863 Scotch; 1,298,929 French; 254,319 Germans.  The balance is made up of Dutch, Scandinavians, and Italians.  A large number of persons who were born in the United States are to be found in Canada—and why not?  They have in Canada a government quite as free as in the United States, though the Canadians prefer to have a holiday on the Queen’s birthday rather than the 4th of July, and an English Viceroy—who at any rate is a gentleman—to an American President.  Anywhere in Canada the Englishman is at home.  The people have an English look.  Directly you pass the border into the States you see the difference.  There is an astonishing contrast between the healthy Canadian and the lean and yellow Yankee.

Canadian history is one record of toil and struggle—of the advance of the whites, of the retreat of the native races.  Foremost in suffering were the French.  In 1608 the first permanent settlement in Canada was made by Champlain, who founded Quebec, and afterwards discovered the lake which still bears his name.  It was he who taught the Iroquois to stand in awe of gunpowder; but, alas! familiarity bred contempt, and the Red Indian was more than once on the point of exterminating the white man.  It was only by the intercession of the Saints that the feeble colony was preserved.  At Montreal, for instance, the advanced guard of the settlements, some two hundred Iroquois fell upon twenty-six Frenchmen.  The Christians were out-matched eight to one, but, says the Chronicle, ‘the Queen of Heaven was on their side, and the Son of Mary refuses nothing to His holy Mother.  Through her intercession the Iroquois shot so wildly, that at their first fire every bullet missed its mark, and they met with a bloody defeat.’  No wonder the French were animated with renewed zeal.  Father Le Mercier writes: ‘On the day of Visitation of the Holy Virgin, the chief Aontarisati, so regretted by the Iroquois, was taken prisoner by our Indians, instructed by our fathers, and baptized; and on the same day, being put to death, I doubt not he thanked the Virgin for his misfortune and the blessing that followed, and he prayed to God for his countrymen.’

It was no common faith that led the French monks to seek to make Canada theirs.  Their sufferings from cold, from starvation, from the savages, from want of all the comforts of life, seem to have been as much as mortal men could bear.  But they made many converts.  On one occasion, when the French Chaumont had delivered an address, his Indian auditors declared that if he had spoken all day they should not have had enough of it.  ‘The Dutch,’ said they, ‘have neither brains nor tongues; they never tell us about paradise or hell.  On the contrary, they lead us into bad ways.’  Nothing could daunt the Jesuits—not the loss of all they had, nor protracted suffering, nor cruel death.  ‘The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church,’ said one of them; ‘and if we die by the fires of the Iroquois, we shall have won eternal life by snatching souls from the fires of hell.’

Let us listen to Chaumont again, as he stands before his savage hearers—he and his companions having first, with clasped hands, sung the ‘Veni Creator’: ‘It is not trade that brings us here.  Do you think that your beaver-skins can pay us for all our toil and dangers?  Keep them, if you like; or, if any fall into our hands, we shall use them only for your service.  We seek not the things that perish.  It is for the faith that we have left our homes, to live in your hovels of bark and eat food which the beasts of our country would scarcely touch.  We are the messengers whom God has sent to tell you that His Son became a man for the love of you; that this man, the Son of God, is the Prince and Master of men; that He has prepared in heaven eternal joys for those who obey Him, and kindled the fires of hell for those who will not receive His Word.  If you reject it, whoever you are—Onondaga, Seneca, Mohawk, Cayuga, or Oneida—know that Jesus Christ, who inspires my heart and my voice, will one day plunge you into hell.  Be not the authors of your own destruction.  Accept the truth; listen to the voice of the Omnipotent!’

Wonderful miracles sustained and renewed this ardent faith.  In the autumn of 1657, there was a truce with the Iroquois, under cover of which three or four of them came to the Montreal settlement.  Nicholas Godé and Jean Pière were on the roof of their house, laying thatch, when one of his visitors aimed his arquebuse at Saint Pière, and brought him to the ground like a wild turkey from a tree.  The assassins, having cut off his head and carried it home to their village, were amazed to hear it speak to them in good Iroquois, scold them for their perfidy, and threaten them with the vengeance of heaven; and we are told they continued to hear its voice of admonition even after scalping it and throwing away the skull.

During a great part of this period, the French population was less than three thousand.  How was it they were not destroyed?  Mr. Parkman tells us for two reasons.  In the first place, the settlements were grouped around three fortified posts—Quebec, Three Rivers, and Montreal—which, in time of danger, gave an asylum to the fugitive inhabitants; and secondly, their assailants were distracted by other wars.  It was their aim to balance the rival settlements of the Hudson and the St. Lawrence.  It was well for Canada when France lost hold of her.  In 1666, Louis the Great handed her over, bound hand and foot, to a company of merchants—the Company of the West, as it was called.  As, according to the edict, the chief object in view was the glory of God, the Company was required to supply its possessions with a sufficient number of priests, and diligently exclude all teachers of false doctrine.  It was empowered to build forts and war-ships, cast cannon, wage war, make peace, establish courts, appoint judges, and otherwise to act as sovereign within its own dominions.  A monopoly of trade was granted it for forty years, and Canada was the chief sufferer; but at any rate the peopling of Canada was due to the king.  Colbert did the work and the king paid for it.  Protestants were objected to.  Girls, to be wives to the emigrants, were sent out from Dieppe and Rochelle.  In time, girls of indifferent virtue, under the care of duennas, emigrated to meet the growing demand for wives.  ‘I am told,’ writes La Houtan, ‘that the plumpest were taken first, because it was thought, being less active, they were more likely to keep at home, and that they could resist the winter cold still better.’  Further, such was the paternal care of the king for Canada, that he attempted to found a colonial noblesse, and offered bounties for children.  The noblesse were a doubtful boon: industrious peasants were much more to be desired.  Leading lazy lives, many of the gentilhommes soon drifted into the direst poverty.  The Canadians had one advantage—their morals were well looked after by the priests, who kindly took charge of their education as well.  Compared with the New England man, the habitant had very much the advantage.  He was a skilful woodsman, able to steer his canoe, a soldier and a hunter.  Nevertheless, when Wolfe’s army had scaled the heights of Abraham, and won Canada for the British, it was the beginning of a new life.

‘England,’ writes Mr. Parkman, ‘imposed by the sword on reluctant Canada the boon of rational and ordered liberty.  A happier calamity never befell a people than the conquest of Canada by the British arms.’  But it was not till the American Revolution had broken out, and the royalists left the States to found in Canada a strong colony attached to the British Crown, that Canada may be really said to have been a part and parcel of the Empire, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.  It was necessary to move many of the French Canadians elsewhere; and those who remained, still for long looked with an unfriendly eye on England and her rule.

CHAPTER II.

OFF WITH THE EMIGRANTS—THE VOYAGE OUT—THE ‘SARNIA’ THE COD-FISHERY.

One Wednesday at the end of April, last year, St. Pancras Railway Station was the scene of a display not often matched even in these demonstrative days.  Mr. J. J. Jones, of the Samaritan Mission, had arranged to take out a party of five hundred emigrants to Canada—the first party of the season.  The event seemed to create no little excitement in philanthropic circles.  The Lord Mayor had promised to be there, but he was detained in the City, possibly in defence of the ancient Corporation of which he has become the champion; but he sent a cordial letter, as did many other distinguished people, to express sympathy and goodwill.

In the absence of the Lord Mayor, the Earl of Shaftesbury, after the emigrants had been got together in a waiting-room, presided at a farewell meeting, which ought to have sent the emigrants in the best of spirits to the new homes they expect to find on the other side of the Atlantic.  They would, said his lordship, still be under the reign of our Queen.  They would confer a great blessing on the country whither they were going, and they would show what they could do as good citizens in subduing and replenishing the earth, and in spreading over the world the Anglo-Saxon race.  He hoped that the young men present would come back to England for wives, and ended with his best wishes for all in the way of a safe voyage and temporal and spiritual good.

The Earl of Carnarvon, who next spoke, had this advantage over the noble chairman, in that he had made a trip to Canada himself.  The emigrants, he said, would encounter difficulties.  They were not going to a paradise, but they would find that they had a better chance of getting a living in the New World; especially if they avoided bad company and the crowded towns, and got into the country, and underwent a certain preparatory training.  As to Canada, it was a country in which a man would succeed who had health and strength and industry, and a good head and a good heart, and the fear of God to teach him that honesty was the best policy.

Sir Henry Tyler, M.P., the chairman of the Grand Trunk Railway, followed in a similar strain.  The people were not crowded up in Canada as they were here.  It was a grand country for honest, hard-working men and well-behaved women; but he recommended them at first to seek good honest people to work with, rather than high wages.  Turning to the young women, he assured them they would find good husbands in Canada—a remark which seemed to give them much satisfaction; and he hoped that they would have large families when they married, as large families were a blessing out there.

Then came forward Mr. Clare Sewell Read, M.P., who, as a countryman, said he saw some country bumpkins in the party, and he could assure them, as he had been in Canada, its soil was unrivalled for fertility.

Lord Napier of Magdala followed, and then came the Hon. Donald A. Smith, one of the directors of the Canadian Pacific Railway, to tell how people prospered in Canada who behaved well and worked hard.  The Rev. Oswald Dykes and the Rev. Burman Cassin also addressed the audience; and there were others, such as the Earl of Aberdeen, the Rev. W. Tyler, and the Rev. Styleman Herring, who were ready to say a few words had time permitted; but the train had to be packed up with passengers and luggage, and there was no time to spare.

In a few minutes they were off, amidst tears and cheers, while Mr. Jones and I, with Mr. Alexander Begg, of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and the remainder of the emigrants, followed.  A little after five we arrived at Liverpool, and then Mr. Jones had to work like a horse.

Meanwhile, I, with a couple of artistic friends, who are to sketch us, all took our ease in our inn, from which comfortable quarters I felt sadly indisposed to stir; but I had to see the emigrants off, and my heart sank into my shoes as, looking at the hundreds swarming the platform, and the pyramids of luggage, and then at the Sarnia moored in mid-stream, the thought suggested itself, How on earth can they all be stowed away?—a query which, however, was soon settled, as, at a later hour, I found myself on board the Sarnia, leaving smoky Liverpool behind, and with the ship’s head turned to the sunset ‘and the baths of all the Western stars.’

The Sarnia, it may be as well to inform my readers, is one of the screw-steamers running between Quebec and Liverpool, by the Dominion Line, which line commenced its gay career in 1870.  I ought to be very happy on board, since I learn, from the attentive perusal of documents lying in the cabin, that, owing to the lines in the model, the rolling of the ship is to a great extent, not destroyed, but reduced, making a considerable decrease in sea-sickness, and that in the book of rules and regulations compiled for the guidance of the Dominion Line officers, they must run no risk which might by any possibility result in accident to the ship, and that they are further requested to bear in mind that the safety of the lives and property entrusted to their care is the ruling principle that should govern them in the management of their ships.  I almost fancy I must have thrown away my money in insuring my life against loss and my person against accidents.  What have I to fear, if the rules and regulations of the company be observed?  I am very glad, as it is, I did not insure for a larger sum, though the agent, who, of course, had his eye on the extra commission, was kind enough to suggest it were well to insure for the larger sum, in case the ship went down!—a thing not to be dreamed of.

I have consulted that oracle of our fathers—Francis Moore.  In his ‘Vox Stellarum’ he tells me, to my comfort and satisfaction, that after the 25th of April the winds will be light.  Francis Moore, you may tell me, is not weatherwise.  Are the scientific meteorologists, with their forecasts, wiser?  It is hard to say.

It is a comfort to think that the emigrants are well off for literature.  The Graphic company—whose last dividend, I learn, was a good deal over a hundred per cent.—have sent a tremendous packet of Graphics.  The Bible Society sent Testaments.  The Religious Tract Society have placed at Mr. Jones’s disposal tracts and books.  The Rev. Newman Hall has sent 250 books, while a goodly packet of the ‘Family Circle Edition’ of the Christian World will, I dare say, be in much request—quite as much as the five hundred sheets of hymns which the Earl of Aberdeen brought with him on Wednesday to St. Pancras as his contribution to the common stock.  Yes, indeed, as my Welsh friends would say, the lines for us are cast in pleasant places, and we have a goodly heritage.  It is to be hoped it may be so.

I never saw a more tidy lot of emigrants—some of them evidently the right class to get on.  I had an amusing chat with one, who told me what inquiries he had made before he would entrust Mr. J. J. Jones with ‘Cæsar and his fortunes.’  If the emigrants are all like him, the Yankees, if there be such in Canada, will find it rather difficult to take them in.  We swarm with children and babies.  I fear some of us will wish, before we reach the St. Lawrence, that good King Herod was on board.  Of course, these are not my sentiments.  I suppose most of us were babies once—there is every reason to believe that I was; nevertheless, the most gushing mother will admit that there are times when even the sweetest of babes ceases to charm.  My companions in the smoking-room the first night were, however, by no means babes.  I had not been there half-an-hour before I was offered 34,000 acres of land—abounding with fish and game, and all that the carnal heart could desire—a decided bargain.  I did not close with the offer.  Perhaps I ought to have done so.  But such earthly grandeur is beyond my dreams.

Nothing can be drearier or more monotonous than a trip to Canada in the early season of the year.  After you leave Ireland, you see no ships—nothing but the sea, grey and dull as the heaven above.  Now and then a whale comes up to blow, and that is all; and when the wind blows hard, you get nothing but big, lumpy waves, which set the ship rolling, and add only to the discomforts.  And then you are on the Newfoundland banks, where you may spend dull days and duller nights—now going at half-speed, now stopping altogether, while the fog-horn blows dismally every few minutes, and whence you can see scarcely the length of the ship ahead.

Like Oscar Wilde, I own that I am very much disappointed with the Atlantic.  The icebergs are monotonous—when you have seen one, that is enough.  In the saloon, we are a sad, dull party; even in the smoking-room, one can scarcely get up a decent laugh.  I pity the poor emigrants in the steerage, whom a clever young Irish journalist on board, with the instinct of his race, has failed to excite into a proper state of indignation on account of the discomforts of the voyage, and the hardness of the potatoes—always a matter of complaint in all the ships that I have ever been on board of.

The raw, cold, damp fog has taken all the starch out of the steerage passengers, always the first to grumble on sea, as they are on shore; yet on one occasion they did go so far as to send a deputation to the captain, and what, think you, was their grievance?—that they had no sauce to their fish!—a grievance of little account, when one thinks of the sauce we had served up in the saloon.

As a rule, the steerage passengers are a difficult body to deal with; they seem so helpless, and require so much looking after.  Mr. Jones has enough to do to look after his.  If they lose anything, however paltry, he is appealed to.  If they require anything not provided in the bill of fare, he is sent for.  It is very clear to me that his party have great advantages.  He has taken down all their occupations, and when we arrive at Quebec they will all, if possible, be provided with employment, and will be at once forwarded to their destination, without loss of time or expenditure of cash.  Many of them are also assisted by his Society with small sums of money, and in every way they are helped as few other emigrants are.

We have on board a party of fifty-one lads, sent out by Dr. Bowman Stephenson, who has a depôt somewhere near Hamilton, and a helper is on board to take care of them.  Some of them are of very juvenile years, and, it is to be believed, in Canada will find a far more favourable lot than they ever could in the streets and slums of the East End.

‘What are you going to do?’ said I to one of them the other morning.

‘Please, sir, I am going to be adopted,’ was the reply; and adopted he will be by some worthy couple who, having no children of their own, are ready to give the little outcast a home such as he never could have found in the old country.

We have also an agent on board, who, for a certain sum, agrees to take young fellows out and to find them suitable situations.  That is a course I should not recommend.  A young fellow had far better keep that extra cash in his pocket, get out as far into the North-west as he can, there hire himself to some settler, who at this time of year is sure to be in need of his services, and then in a year or two he will be able to get a grant of land on his own account, on which, after three years of real hard work, he will be able to live in peace and comfort, and to achieve an independence of which he has no chance on our side of the Atlantic.

It quite grieves me to think of the poor farmers I have known at home, wasting their time and capital and strength in a hopeless effort to make both ends meet, who might be doing well out here, with the certainty that their families will be left in a comfortable position as far as this world’s goods are concerned.  One thing, however, I must strongly impress upon the emigrant, and that is, the necessity of coming out in the spring.

It is madness to cross the Atlantic in the autumn; when he lands at Quebec, he will find nothing to do, and must live on his capital, or starve till next spring; and if I might recommend a ship, it certainly would be the Sarnia, on which I now write.  She is slow but sure.  Her commander, Captain Gibson, is all that a captain should be—not a brilliant conversationalist, not one of those men who set the table in a roar; but cautious, skilful, fully alive to the responsibilities of his position and the dangers of his calling.  As to the dangers, it is impossible to exaggerate them.  There are more than a thousand of us on board, and were anything to happen, not more than three hundred of us could, I should think, be crowded into the boats, provided that the sea were quite calm, and that we had plenty of time to leave the ship; and in a panic and in bad weather, it is clear that even such boats as the Sarnia is supplied with would be of little avail.  Safety seems to me a mere matter of chance.  You hit on an iceberg, and down goes the ship with all on board, leaving no record behind.

As a matter of fact, I believe these big steamers often, on a dark night, run down the vessels engaged in fishing off the Newfoundland banks.  When we passed, the season had scarcely commenced.  It is in May, towards the end of the month, that the fishing commences.  The chief fishermen are the French, who mostly hail from St. Malo, and who have in the Gulf of Newfoundland two small islands, which they use for fish-curing.  You get an idea of the extent of these fisheries, when I tell you that the total value of them amounts to three millions a year, and that the supply seems inexhaustible.  Romanists and High Churchmen who indulge in salt cod in Lent have little cause to fear that that aid to true religion will cease—at any rate, in our time.  The fishing season lasts until November, when the shoals pass on to their winter quarters in deeper waters.

The delicate and the consumptive have many reasons for thankfulness in connection with this fishery.  What they would do without the cod-liver oil, which has saved and lengthened many a valuable life, it were hard to say.  It is to England that almost all the cod-liver oil comes.  The cod roe, pickled and barrelled, is exported almost entirely to France, where it is in great demand, as ground-bait for the sardine fishery.  How great that demand is, the reader will at once perceive when I tell him that no fewer than 13,000 boats on the coast of Brittany are engaged in the sardine fishery alone.

I ought to say that these Quebec steamers are, as regards saloon accommodation, and the class of people you meet with on board, not quite on a par with those which ply between Liverpool and New York.  Perhaps the latter are fitted up almost too splendidly.  ‘When the stormy winds do blow’—when everyone is ill—when you are in that happy state of mind when man delights you not, or woman either—the gilded saloons, the velvet cushions, the plate glass and ornamented panels, seem quite out of place; to say nothing of the luxurious dinners, which not everyone is able to enjoy.  Such things are better fitted for summer seas and summer skies.

CHAPTER III.

ARRIVAL AT QUEBEC.

Once more I am on terra firma, and on Canadian soil, where I breathe a balmier air and rejoice in a clearer atmosphere than you in England can have any idea of.  After all, we were in twenty-four hours before the mail steamer, the Sarmatian, which you must own is a feather in the cap of the Sarnia.  One hears much of the St. Lawrence, but it is hard to exaggerate its beauties.  When you are fairly in it, after having escaped the fog of the Newfoundland Banks and the icebergs of the Gulf, on you sail all day and night amidst islands, and past mountains, their tops covered with snow, stretching far away into the interior, guarding lands yet waiting to be tilled, and primeval forests yet ignorant of the woodcutter’s axe.  A hardy people, mostly of French extraction, inhabit that part of the province of Quebec; but as you reach nearer to the capital, the land becomes flatter, and the signs of human settlement more frequent in the shape of wooden houses, each with its plot of ground, where the rustics carry on the daily work of the farm, or in the shape of villages, inhabited by ship-wrecked fishermen, who have intermarried with the French, and whose children, if they bear the commonest of English names, are at the same time utterly ignorant, not only of the tongue that Shakespeare spake, but of the faith and morals Milton held.  They are a lazy people, living chiefly on the harvest of the sea, and doing little when that harvest is over.  Men are wanted to cut down timber, and they come in gangs of two or three hundred, and spend a week in riotous debauchery before they can be got to work.  Few English settlers go into that region, yet they can easily make a living there if they are inclined to rough it in the bush, and are not afraid of coarse living and hard work.  Villages, churches, hotels, are all built of wood on a stone foundation, and, painted as the houses are, they remind one not a little of Zaandam, and the little wooden cottages you may see in that old quarter of the world.  But the original colonists are a poor people, living frugally and with little desire for the comforts and luxuries of life.  It is the same in Quebec, where the poor all talk French, and where the Protestants are in a very small minority.  In Quebec there is little to attract the stranger.  It looks its best at it stands on its picturesque rock rising out of the St. Lawrence.  You see the French University, founded as far back as 1663 by that De Laval whose name is so deeply interwoven with the French history of the province.  It is thus that his contemporaries describe him.  ‘He began,’ writes Mother Juchiereau de Saint Denis, Superior of the Hôtel Dieu, ‘in his tenderest years the study of perfection, and we have reason to believe he reached it, since every virtue which St. Paul demands in a bishop was seen and admired in him.’  Mother Marie, Superior of the Ursulines, wrote: ‘I will not say that he is a saint, but I may say with truth that he lives like a saint and an apostle.  We have ample evidence of the austerity of his life.  His servant, a lay-brother, testified after his death that he slept on a hard bed, and would not suffer it to be changed, even when it became full of fleas.  So great was his charity that he gave fifteen hundred or two thousand francs to the poor every year.’  ‘I have seen him,’ writes Houssart, ‘keep cooked meat five or six, seven or eight days, in the heat of summer, and when it was all mouldy and wormy, he washed it in warm water, and ate it, and told me it was very good.  I determined to keep everything I could that had belonged to his holy person, and after his death to soak bits of linen in his blood when his body was opened, and take a few bones and cartilages from his breast, cut off his hair, and keep his clothes and such things to serve as most precious relics.’

Then you see the spire of the English Cathedral, a very plain building, and higher up still, the modern Parliament House, but recently erected.  Further on, you see the Dufferin Promenade, which is a lasting record to the most popular of English Governors-General; and higher up still is the citadel, and beyond that are the plains of Abraham, where Wolfe fell in the hour of victory.

The Presbyterians and Wesleyans have good congregations, but the Baptists are not strong, in spite of the wonderful vitality of the aged pastor, Mr. Marsh, who, octogenarian as he is, seemed much more able to climb the heights than the writer, who perhaps was a little out of condition on account of the laziness of sea life.  One of the buildings with which I was most pleased was that of the Young Men’s Christian Association (built partly by the munificence of Mr. George Williams, of London, the founder of the Young Men’s Christian Associations all the world over), which is quite a credit to the place, and from the top of which you get a magnificent view of the quaint old city, with its gates and narrow streets, and the pleasant suburbs, and the far-away plains and hills, amongst which the St. Lawrence or the river Charles, which runs into it here, urges on its wild career.

‘In a city where we have to contend,’ says the last Report of the Association, ‘against great disadvantages, where the Protestant population seems to be gradually diminishing, and the young men seeking other fields of enterprise, it is a matter of sincere thankfulness that we have not to record a retrograde movement.’  It was with regret that I saw that the Independent church, which is a fine one, has had to close its doors.  Another disadvantage resulting from this decay of Protestantism is, that the Protestants have to bear more than their fair share of taxation, as the Roman Catholic churches and convents and nunneries, which are wealthy, are exempt from taxation altogether.  I fancy, also, that the men employed at the extensive wharves are doing all they can to drive the trade away, as they impose such regulations as to the number of men to be employed in loading or unloading ships, that now many of them load lower down the river.  However, the place is busy enough, especially on the other side of the river, where the steamers land their passengers, and where Miss Richardson has established a comfortable home for girls and young women—which I inspected—free of expense, as they arrive from England, and seeks to plant them out where their services may be required.

One of our latest lady writers is very enthusiastic on the subject of Quebec.  I am sorry to say I cannot share in that enthusiasm, and I was by no means disconsolate that I could not stay to attend a convivial meeting to which I was invited by a French colonist, one of our fellow-passengers.  I was soon tired of its dusty and narrows streets, and its pavements all made of boards, and its priests and nuns.  There are no shops to look at worth speaking of, and the idea of riding in one of the caleches was quite out of the question.  Nothing more rickety in the shape of a riding machine was ever invented.  It seemed to me that they were sure to turn over as soon as you turned the corner.  The caleche is simply a little sledge on wheels.  As a sledge I fancy it is delightful, though by no means up to the sledges I have driven on the Elbe in hard winters in days long long departed; but as a carriage, drawn by a broken-down horse, with a driver almost as wild as the original Indian, the caleche, I own, finds little favour in my eyes.  Up the town there does not seem much life.  There is plenty of it, however, in the shipping district, where a great deal of building is going on.

Of one thing I must complain in connection with emigration, and that is the pity the emigrants land at Quebec at all.  The steamers all go up to Montreal after they have shot down their helpless crowd of emigrants on the wharf, where they have to spend a dreary day waiting to get their luggage.  How much more pleasant it would be to take them right on to Montreal, which, at any rate, is the destination of ninety-nine out of a hundred at the very least.  As it is, they are taken on by a special train, which starts no one knows when, and which arrives at Montreal at what hour it suits the railway authorities.  In that respect, it seems to me, there is room for great improvement; but on this head I speak diffidently, as, perhaps, the steamship owners and the railway companies know their own business better than I do.  The trip is a picturesque one, and can be enjoyed in these short nights better on the deck of a steamer than in a railway-car.  [I am glad to hear since writing the above that this state of things will not further exist, and that every arrangement is now being made by the Canadian Pacific Railway authorities for the speedy transfer from the steamer to the train.]  The more I see of matters, the clearer it seems to me that large parties of emigrants should not be sent out by themselves, but that they should be under the care of some one who knows the country and the railway officials.

I am sorry to say, as regards some of the better class of emigrants, the long delay at Quebec gave them an opportunity of getting drunk, of which they seemed gladly to have availed themselves.  The future of some of these young fellows it is not difficult to predict.  In a little while they will have exhausted their resources, and will return home disgusted with Canada, and swearing that it is impossible to get a living there.  There was no need for them to go to an hotel at all.  In the yard there was a capital shed fitted up for refreshments.  I had there a plate of good ham, bread-and-butter and jam, and as much good tea as I wanted—all for a shilling.  It was a boon indeed to the emigrants we had landed from the Sarnia to find such a place at their disposal.

As to myself, I need not assure you I was glad enough to find myself in a Pullman car, bound for Montreal.  I shed no tears as we left Quebec far behind, and glided on under a cloudless, moonlit sky, serenaded by those Canadian nightingales, the frogs.  At first I felt a little difficulty in retiring to rest.  As a modest man, I was inclined to object to the presence of so many ladies, although we had been on the best of terms during our voyage out.  It is true that they had their husbands with them, but nevertheless I felt uncomfortable, and vowed I would retreat to the smoking-room.  However, I was over-persuaded, and lay down with the rest; though more than once that eventful night I was awoke by awful sounds, reminding me rather of the hoarse roar of the Atlantic in a storm than of the peaceful slumbers of a Pullman car.

CHAPTER IV.

AT MONTREAL, AND ON TO OTTAWA—INTERVIEWING AND INTERVIEWED.

One discovery I have made since I have been here is that Canada has its clouded skies and its rainy days, and that a Canadian spring may be quite as ungenial as an English one.  Yet it is, I still see, the country for a working man.  And I write this in full knowledge of the fact that here at Montreal the charitable, on whom the poor depend—for there is no poor-law in this country, and let us hope, seeing what mischief has been done by poor-laws, there may never be one—have been sorely exercised this winter how to feed the hungry, and to clothe the naked, and to find the outcast a home.  But, mind you, I only recommend the place for the poor agricultural labourer or artisan; and already I find the larger portion of such who have come out with me are in full work, and are thankful that they have come, but they had to take anything that was offered.  It is clear this is not the country for clerks and shop-lads, and the secretary of the Young Men’s Christian Association—which I find here to be a flourishing institution—writes:

‘Young men are coming by each steamer.  Many of them are introduced to us with excellent recommendations, and have occupied good positions in England.  Some have left their situations on the representation of railway and steamboat agents as to the opportunities in this country.  We find it absolutely impossible to secure employment for them in many cases, business in every department has been so dull.  Almost all the houses have been employing hands that they could dispense with.  Reports from the West show the market glutted as bad as in Montreal.’  And I fear things have not improved since.

It is cruel to get such young men out of England.  They are worse off here than they would be at home.  It is curious to note, in connection with emigration, the evident desire of the educated mechanic to keep his rivals out.  ‘By all means bid them stop at home,’ he cries, ‘or wages will be lower in the colonies.’  Already I have been interviewed by a working-class official here, and that is his cry.  And I give it for what it may be worth, merely remarking that such illustrations as he gave in support of his views turned out to be the merest moonshine.

Now let me speak of Montreal, which I entered with pleasure, and leave with regret.  It is the chief city of Canada, and is built on the northern bank of the St. Lawrence, where the muddy Ottawa, after a course of 600 miles, debouches into it.  You arrive by a grand railway bridge, which is one of the wonders of this part of the world.  The population is nearly 200,000, of which two-thirds are French or Irish, and Roman Catholic.  It abounds with every sign of prosperity, and, as a city, would be a credit to the old country.  The river front is lined with steamers loading for England.  The principal thoroughfares contain lofty buildings, and shops as spacious as any of our best, whilst its hotels altogether throw ours into the shade; and then, in the suburbs the merchants live in palaces, whilst handsome churches attest the wealth, if not the piety, of all classes of the population.  I fear Mammon worship is the prevailing form of idolatry, yet I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that the early settlement of the place was the result of religious enthusiasm, and that it was an attempt to found in America a veritable kingdom of God as understood by the Roman Catholics; but all that is past, and the chief topics of interest are the prices of pork, or the state of the market as regards butter and cheese.  Let me remind you that such is the goodness of the cheese of Canada, all made in factories, that nearly as much cheese finds its way into the English market from Montreal as from New York.

One thing especially strikes me, and that is the muscular character of the young men.  Montreal is a great place for athletes.  Montreal has hundreds of such, as it is not only a centre of commerce, but the most important manufacturing city in the Dominion—3,000 hands are employed in the manufacture of boots and shoes.  Then there are here the largest sugar refineries and cotton mills and silk and cloth factories in Canada, and the result is that, as these factories are nursed by Protection, the towns are unnaturally crowded, and the people all over the country have to pay high prices for inferior articles, and the Canadians, who ought to be making cheese and butter, and growing corn for the artisans of Lancashire, are doing all they can to reduce their best and most natural customers to a state of starvation.  ‘It is a shame,’ said a Canadian manufacturer to me, only in language a little more emphatic, ‘that England allows any of her colonies to put prohibitory duties on British products.’  And I quite agree with my friend that it is a shame.  However, as long as the present Canadian Government are in power, there is no chance of Free Trade.  It was the Protection cry that placed the Conservatives in power.  With so many French as there are in Canada, vainly dreaming of a restoration of French rule, it is idle to talk of the interests of the mother country.  Nor does Great Britain deserve very well of the Canadians.  Up to almost the present time it has held them to be of little account, and, as we all know, it is not so very long since it suffered Brother Jonathan to annex that part of Maine in which Portland is situated, and thus to deprive Canada of its only winter harbour.

For one thing Montreal is to be highly commended, and that is on account of its hotels.  The Windsor Hotel, in Dominion Square, is one of the finest hotels in America, and as you enter you are quite bewildered at the magnificence of the entrance-hall.  A curious thing happened to me there.  Mr. Hoyle and Mr. Barker, of the U.K. Alliance, had come there after a pilgrimage in the States, and it was determined to give them a reception.  I had a ticket, and went for about an hour, chatting pleasantly with readers, who had known me by repute, and were glad to shake hands with me.  Imagine my horror when, in the next morning’s paper, I read that the reception had been got up by Temperance friends for me, as well as Messrs. Hoyle and Barker, and that my humble name figured first on the list.  Perhaps this was meant as a consolation to me.  I had been interviewed on the previous day, and the papers had spoken of me in such complimentary terms that I felt almost a lion.

Alas! in America interviewing is quite a common-place affair, and it gives no éclat to be interviewed.  People sat smoking in the hall as I passed, utterly unconscious of the fact.  Yet the reporters did their best.  One of them called after I was gone to bed.  He said he was not going to be scooped out by the other fellow, whatever that may mean.  Virtue in his case was not rewarded.  I kept to my bed, and left the enterprising reporter to do the best he could.

I ought to say a word of the hotel at which I stopped—the Lawrence Hall, in James’s Street—which I strongly recommend to all, especially to such of my friends as may be contemplating a visit to Montreal.  The bedrooms are beautifully clean, the cooking is excellent, and the service is admirable.  It enjoys a tremendous amount of support.  I was there just forty-eight hours, and I counted as many as two hundred names of arrivals after me, and yet, in spite of the crowd, there was ample accommodation for all, and I and my friends dined as comfortably and quietly as if we had been at home.  The proprietor, Mr. Hogan, is a gentleman with whom it is a pleasure to converse.  Nor are his charges high.

It is a sight to sit in the hall and watch the ever-shifting crowd, or to stray into the shaving apartment, where a dozen barbers are always hard at work.  I own I became a victim, and paid a shilling for a performance which in London only costs me sixpence; but in London I simply have my hair cut, here I was under the care of a ‘professional artist.’  I quote his card: ‘Physiognomical hairdresser, facial operator, cranium manipulator, and capillary abridger.’  I could not think of offering so distinguished a professor less than a shilling.  But the fact is, you can’t travel cheaply either in Canada or the United States.

It goes sadly against the grain to pay fivepence for having one’s boots blacked, and the way in which your change is doled out to you is not pleasant, and adds materially to the difficulties of the situation.  For instance, I had a certain American coin the other day pressed into my reluctant hands on the express understanding that it was to go for ten cents.  I paid it to a ferryman, who said it was only worth eight, and then, on that supposition, he managed to cheat me; and I had to appeal to a friend of mine, who told me that I had not the right change, before I could get the man to give me my due; directly, however, the mistake was pointed out he rectified it, thus acknowledging, in the most barefaced manner, his attempt to cheat; and the beauty of it was, I was with a great man of the place, who witnessed the whole transaction, and never said a word, apparently looking upon it as a matter of course.

I fear there is a good deal of villainy in the world, and that it is not confined to America.  Travellers are bound to be victimised, and the best thing you can do is to laugh.  I own I did so at Liverpool the other day, as I was waiting for the tugboat to take me off to the Sarnia.  I knew that I had not made a mistake, I knew that the tug was sure to come; yet four big hulking fellows with brazen faces would have made me believe that I was too late for the tug, and that my only chance of getting on board was for me to let them row me out.  In that case the attempt was the more rascally, as from a small row-boat I could never have boarded the Sarnia had I tried.  Yet there they stood—sullen and expectant—for a quarter of an hour, taking me, possibly, for a bigger fool even than I look.

‘It is a pity,’ said a Canadian lady to me, ‘that Queen Victoria’—for whom all Canada prays that long may she reign over us, happy and glorious—‘fixed upon Ottawa as the site of the Government.’

I am very much inclined to a similar feeling.  At Montreal the change of water affected me very disagreeably.  At Ottawa I was completely floored.  It is a curious fact that almost everyone who goes to Ottawa is taken ill.  I was complaining of my first terrible night to Sir Leonard Tilley, the Finance Minister, and he said that when he first came to Ottawa it was the same with him.

A lady told me that Lady Tupper, who has just left the Colony for England, where, it is said, her lord and master hopes to find a seat in the Imperial Parliament—a consummation devoutly to be wished, as to my mind it is clear that all our colonies should have representatives in Parliament—made a similar complaint as to the effect of the place on her children, and I have it on the best authority that scarcely a session passes but an M.P. pays the penalty of a residence in Ottawa.

In my case I was preserved, as the man in the ‘Arabian Nights’ says, for the greater misfortunes yet to befall me by the use of Dr. Browne’s far-famed ‘Chlorodyne’—an indispensable requisite, I am bound to say, when an emigrant takes his trial trip to Canada.  I know not who is the inventor—I believe it is what we call a patent medicine—that is, a medicine not sanctioned by the faculty—but, as has been observed of the Pickwick pen, it is indeed a boon and a blessing to men.  I used ‘Chlorodyne,’ and was soon all right.  Sir Leonard Tilley told me he did the same, and no one should go to Ottawa without having a small bottle of it in his carpet-bag.

Yet Ottawa is not without a certain freshness of beauty that one associates primâ facie with perfect health.  The stately Government buildings, all of grey stone, are placed on a hill, whence you have a peerless view of river and country and distant hill, and far away forests all around.  A more picturesque site it would be assuredly most difficult to find.  As to the town itself, it is a curious compound—almost Irish in that respect—of splendour and meanness.  There are magnificent shops—and then you come to wooden shanties, which in such a city ought long ere this to have been improved off the face of the earth.  If on a rainy day, unless very careful, you attempt to cross the streets, you are in danger of sticking in the mud, which no one seems to ever think of removing, and in many parts there are disgraceful holes in the plank pavement on which you walk, which are dangerous, especially to the aged and infirm.

In Ottawa the contrasts are more violent than I have seen elsewhere.  Everyone comes to the place.  It is the headquarters of the Dominion.  I met there statesmen, adventurers, wild men of the woods, or prairie, deputies from Manitoba, lawyers from Quebec, sharpers and honest men, all staying at one hotel; and it seemed strange to sit at dinner and see great rough fellows, with the manners of ploughmen, quaffing their costly champagne, and fancying themselves patterns of gentility and taste.  In one thing they disappointed me.  Sir Charles Tupper was to leave for England, and his admirers met outside the hotel to see him off.  There was a carriage and four to convey him to the station, and other carriages followed.  There was a military band in attendance, much to the disgust of the Opposition journals—and yet, in spite of all, the cheers which followed the departing statesman were so faint as to be perfectly ridiculous to a British ear, and seemed quite out of proportion to all the display that had been made.  Certainly they seemed quite childish compared with those which greeted a certain individual, whose name delicacy forbids my mentioning, when, on the last night on board the Sarnia, he ventured humbly to reply to the toast of the Press which had been given in the smoking-room by a Quebec artist returning home from study in Paris.

In Ottawa, certainly, there is no demand for emigrants, unless it be good female servants, who are wanted much more, and can have much more comfortable living, at home.  A lady asked me to send her a few good servants from England.  I replied that my wife wanted them as much as she did, and that it was my duty to attend to her requirements first.

It is curious the airs the raw servant-girls from Ireland give themselves out here.  One day, when I was at Peterborough, one of the head-quarters of the lumber trade—which yesterday was a dense forest, and is now a town of 8,000 people—I heard of the arrival of a lot of girls from Galway.  The drill-hall was set apart for their use, and there they were respectfully waited on by the chief ladies of the district in need of that rarest of created beings—a good maid-of-all-work.  In this particular case one of the arrivals was fixed on.

‘What can you do?’ said the lady.

The girl seemed uncertain on that point.

‘Can you wash?’

‘Oh no!’

‘Can you cook?’

‘Oh no!’

‘Can you do housemaid’s work?’

Well, she thought she could.

Then came the question of wages.

‘Will you take eight dollars a month?’

No, she would not.  Would she accept of nine?  Oh no!  Would she take ten?  Certainly not.

‘What do you want?’ said the lady, beginning to be alarmed.

‘They told me I was to have twelve dollars a month,’ said the girl, and that put a stop to the negotiation.

When I state that an English sovereign is worth at this time four dollars and eighty-six cents, I think you will agree with me that this charming daughter of Erin somewhat overrated the value of her services.  The Canadians are a well-to-do people, but they cannot afford twelve dollars a month for a mere housemaid.  I think it would be well if the respectable young women—of whom there are thousands in England who do not care for the pittance given to a governess, and who prefer the life of a lady-help—were to come out.  They would soon be appreciated.

The average girl selected to be sent out to the colony, so far as I have seen her, is not a model of loveliness or utility.  Were I a Canadian mother, I would sooner have a lady-help.  Nor need the lady-help be afraid of the roughness of her lot.  In Ontario, all the difficulties of the pioneers of civilization have long since disappeared.  One hears strange tales of what those brave men and delicately nurtured ladies had to suffer.

I have seen two—whom I had known when a boy—who were familiar with the best of London literary society, who figured in all the annuals of the season, who were famous in their day, whose sires came over with William the Conqueror.  They were sisters, and married two officers, who had land allotted to them in Canada, and brought out these wellborn and delicately nurtured women into what was then a waste, howling wilderness, where they had to slave as no servant-girl slaves in England, and to fight with the severity of the climate in a way of which the present generation of Canadians have no idea.  Only think, for instance, of your joint roasting at the fire on one side and freezing on the other!  In the settled parts of Canada, such horrors are now amongst the pleasant reminiscences of the past.

But I must return to Ottawa, where the universal testimony of all the heads of the Government was to the effect that Canada is the place for the poor, hard-working man.  There is an emigration-office in every town, where the emigrant is sure to hear of work, if work is to be had.

Canada is a charming place for the traveller.  He sees friends everywhere.  Mr. John H. Pope, Minister of Agriculture, and Mr. John Lowe, Secretary, were especially useful in aiding me.  As I called on the Minister of Finance, he insisted on my seeing the Premier—Sir John Macdonald—who came out of a Council to give me a friendly chat for half an hour, and who kindly asked me to call on him again on my return.  In Canada the Council sits almost daily, and the sitting generally lasts from two till six, as all the business which is left in England to the departments, in Canada is transacted in the Council.  Sir John seemed to think that a good deal of time was wasted in speeches in Parliament, which were intended not for the House, but for the constituents outside: in this respect the Canadian Parliament much resembles a more august assembly nearer home.

I had also the honour of an interview with the Marquis of Lansdowne at the Government House, in a pretty park about a mile out of the town.  His lordship enjoys his residence at Ottawa very much, and said he should leave it with regret.  His idea seemed to be that now was the time for English farmers with a little capital to come out to Ontario, as the old farmers are selling off their farms and going further, to take up large tracts of land in the North-West; and I think many English farmers would be wise if they adopted some such plan.  The Province is called the Garden of Canada.

At present I have seen no very superior land.  There is a good deal of sand where I have been and wheat-growing is out of the question; but the barley is excellent, and is in great demand in the United States, and a good deal of money is made by raising stock and horses.  At any rate, no farmer here is in danger of losing all his capital—most of them are well off, and their sons and daughters prosper as well.

Let me give a few further particulars respecting Sir John Macdonald—perhaps the most abused, and the hardest working man, in all Canada.  He has good Scotch blood in his veins.  In the thirteenth century one of his ancestors looms up as Lord of South Kintyre and the Island of Islay.  When the emigration movement to Canada began, a descendant of this Macdonald settled in Kingston, then the most important town in Upper Canada, and, next to Halifax and Quebec, the strongest fortress in British North America.  He was accompanied by the future Premier, then a lad of five years of age.  The boy was placed at the Royal Grammar School of Kingston, under the tuition of Dr. Wilson, a fellow of the University of Oxford, and subsequently under that of Mr. George Baxter.  Meanwhile, his father moved to Quinté Bay, near the Lake of the Mountain, a lonely, wild country, in which the future Canadian statesman was often to be seen in the holiday time, with a fishing rod in his hand, with other companions as gay-hearted as himself.  At that time he is described as having ‘a very intelligent and pleasing face, strange furry-looking hair, that curled in a dark mass, and a striking nose.’

Indeed, Sir John’s admirers see in him a resemblance to the late Lord Beaconsfield, and that there is a slight resemblance the most superficial observer must admit.  As a lad, Sir John seems to have specially distinguished himself in mathematics.  His master also, we are told, frequently exhibited the clean-kept books of young Macdonald to some careless student for emulation, and as often selected specimens of the neat penmanship of the boy, to put to shame some of the slovenly writers of his class.

At sixteen young Macdonald commenced the study of law, to which he devoted three years.  The gentleman to whom he was articled speaks of him as the most diligent student he had ever seen.  Before he was twenty-one years of age he was admitted to the Bar, opened an office at Kingston, and at once began to practise his profession.  ‘He was,’ says a fellow-student, ‘an exemplary young man, and had the goodwill of everybody.  He remained closely at his business, never went about spreeing, or losing his time, with the young men of his own age and standing, did not drive fast horses, but was always to be found at his post in his office, courteous, obliging, and prompt.’  When Sir John commenced his legal career, the country was full of revolution, and every county in Canada had its Radicals ready to take up muskets or pitchforks against the oppressor.  Sir John, though a Tory, was often the means of doing good service to his friends of the opposite party.  In defending a rebel who was tried for murder, the future Premier gained his first legal success.  It was a time of intense excitement, and crowds thronged to see the prisoners and hear the trials.  Everyone was struck with the masterly character of Sir John’s defence; and though they knew it was not within the power of human tongue or brain to save the prisoner, they admired the skill with which he marshalled his arguments, the tact he displayed in his appeal to the judges, and, above all, the deep interest he displayed in the cause of his unfortunate client.  This was in 1838; from that date Sir John was looked to as a rising man.  In a little while afterwards he commenced his stormy political career.

In 1841 Kingston was made the seat of Government, and Sir John was returned to Parliament, in place of a politician who had lost his popularity.  The assembly was an excited one, and everyone made furious speeches, with the exception of the new member, who sat unmoved at his desk while the fray went on, looking, says a gentleman who well remembers him there, half contemptuous and half careless.  In 1844, he commenced his executive career by being appointed to the Standing Orders Committee.  His first speech was delivered with an easy air of confidence, as captivating as it was rare.  The time ripened rapidly.  The old Tory Compact Party was being swiftly broken up, and when Lord Elgin arrived in Canada, a new Government was formed, with Sir John as Receiver-General.  In a little while he was moved to the Office of Crown Lands, then the most important department in the public service, and one that in the past had been most shamefully, if not most criminally abused, but he was soon out of office, and a new Ministry came into force, pledged to a Bill for the indemnification of parties in Lower Canada whose property had been destroyed in the rebellion.  There were awful riots.  The Parliament buildings in Montreal were burned, and it seemed as if the old feud between Frenchman and Englishman had been roused, never more to die.

Lord Elgin was ready to return to England The reformers were strong, but Macdonald did not despair.  The new Government, amongst other things, were pledged to increased parliamentary representation, the abolition of seignorial tenure, and the secularization of the Clergy Reserves.  Of the Government that attempted to do this, Sir John was a bitter opponent, on the ground that they had hesitated about questions which had set the country in a blaze.  The Government had to retire, and in the Liberal-Conservative Ministry which succeeded to office we find Mr. Macdonald Attorney General, and he held office till he was defeated in his Militia Bill.  He returned to office, however, in time to carry a confederation of the Colonies, and to become Premier, when Lord Monck was Governor-General.

Since he has been at the head of affairs the Hudson Bay Company has handed over its gigantic territory in the North West to the Dominion.  That great work, the Canada Pacific Railway, has nearly been brought to a successful termination, and Canada has taken a leap upwards and onwards to matured life and independence, of which not yet have we seen the end.  It is a terrible scene of personal attack, political life in Canada.  Even since Parliamentary Government has been established, the fight between the ins and the outs has been bitter and constant.  No one can understand it, unless he is a native of the country; and it says much for Sir John that he has risen to the top, and kept himself there so long.  To have done so, he must have possessed more merit than his enemies give him credit for.

CHAPTER V.

TORONTO—THE TOWN—THE PEOPLE—CANADIAN AUTHORS—THE LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION.

Toronto, or the Queen City of the West, as she loves to call herself, stands upon the north shore of Lake Ontario, and has not only achieved a great success, but may be said, in spite of all the moving to the North-West of which we hear so much, to have a great future before it, on account of its position with regard to railways, which alone in this great country decide the fate of towns and cities.  Immediately in front is a broad bay, from which you get an imposing view of the city, while its forest of spires and factory chimneys gives evidence of prosperous and busy life.  I have never been in a city where the Sabbath was more strictly observed.  The omnibus ceases to run on a Sunday, the cab is locked up, and even the cigar-store is closed.  At seven on Saturday evening all the liquor-shops are shut, and in Toronto, as in all the Province, no one can buy a drop of whisky, or wine, or beer, till a decent hour on Monday morning.  It is true, I was invited one Sunday to go and have a glass of whisky and water—an offer which, it is needless to say, I refused; but then, had I accepted the offer, I should have had to go into a club of which my friend was a member.  In Canada, as in England, the club-member may indulge his taste, however strictly the abstinence of his less fortunate brother may be enforced by law.  But the Sunday quiet of Toronto is remarkable.  There are few people but church-goers in the streets, and the churches of all religious denominations are quite as numerous and quite as handsome as any we have in England.  They are all built on a larger scale, and are all well-filled.  On Sunday evening I had to light my way into the Congregational church, of which Dr. Wild is the minister.  He hails from America, and is quite the sensation of the hour.  There was no standing-room anywhere, and as I made to the door I met many coming away.  However, I had made up my mind to hear the Doctor, and hear him I did.  It seems that the subscribers have a door to themselves; I made for it, and luckily found a chair, which I wedged in under the platform.  As I entered, the Doctor was making the people laugh by answering questions that had been sent to him in writing.  Then we had quite a service of song.  The choir behind him performed, a lady sang a solo, the congregation joined in a well-known English hymn.  The Doctor prayed, and then we had a sermon about Revelation, containing much that was very effective, if not about his text, at any rate about that mysterious part of Scripture from which the text was taken.  The Doctor is now in the prime of life, and his preaching powerful and effective.  The audience consisted chiefly of men; perhaps that may be considered in the Doctor’s favour.  One thing did surprise me, and that was to see seated at a table right under the pulpit platform a reporter coolly taking notes.  Our English reporters in a place of worship on a Sunday are certainly more modest, and prefer to blush unseen.

Toronto rises up, with its grand public buildings, proudly from the shore.  The site of the city was very marshy, and at one time it was known as Muddy York.  Only yesterday a lady was telling me how her mother was near losing her life in the mud of the chief street, leaving behind her the English pattens of which she was so proud.  The further from the lake, the more the land rises, till you reach where, as Tom Moore wrote—

‘The blue hills of old Toronto shed
Their evening shadows o’er Ontario’s bed.’

In 1812 the population of the place was under 1,000.  It is now, including the suburbs, where some of the wealthiest citizens live in houses as well-built and as luxuriously fitted up as any in London, about 116,000.  King Street, the principal one, is built up with substantial brick and stone buildings, many of which are equal to any on the American Continent.  Forty years since, it was completely composed of wooden structures, and was barely passable to pedestrians.  Now, it is adorned with stately stores, where the latest novelties of the Old World and the New are ostentatiously displayed.  The public buildings are quite an ornament to the place, and the offices of the leading newspaper, The Toronto Mail, are one of the sights of the city.  The yearly civic income and expenditure is over 2,000,000 dollars, and the assessed value of property last year was 61,942,581 dollars.  The streets are spacious, well laid out, and regularly built.  The two main arteries of the city are King and George Streets, which, crossing each other at right angles, divide the city into four large sections.  I don’t think house-rent is cheap.  I have been in one or two private houses, the rents of which seemed to me certainly dearer than would be the rents of similar houses in London.  But, then, in Toronto—think of it, O respected Paterfamilias!—the best cuts of meat are about eightpence a pound, and prime butter is not much more, and—Sir Henry Thompson will rejoice to hear this—there is a plentiful supply of fish.  The city also boasts of fine theatres, and halls, and colleges; while the Episcopalian Cathedral in James Street possesses the celebrated chimney and illuminated clock which took the first prize at the Vienna Exhibition, and which was purchased by the citizens, and presented to the Dean and churchwardens of the place on Christmas-eve, 1876.  They tell me, however, that the strongest body of Christians in the city is that of the Wesleyans.  I am staying at Walker House, the most comfortable place which I have discovered thus far.  Toronto itself offers few opportunities to the emigrant, and the citizens are not enthusiastic in his favour.  I met a reverend gentleman from England here, who, the other night, at a meeting of mechanics, vainly endeavoured to say a word in favour of emigration, and had to desist under the threat that if he did not they would knock off his head.  The mechanics here are very much afraid that if more of their own class come out, wages will be lowered.  Nor are Irish emigrants in much favour here, as they stop in the city instead of going into the country in search of work, and have to be supported by the charitable and humane.  Only a few days since a large batch of Irish arrived.  Work had been found for them which they agreed to accept, and they were on the point of being forwarded, when they were got at by the Irish already in the city, and now they refuse to budge.

The other day I met Dr. Barnardo’s agent, who has come out with some of his trained boys to settle them in Peterborough, where Mr. G. A. Cox, the Mayor of the place, has kindly given a commodious house for their use.  Already, I believe, the Doctor has sent out 780 boys and about 470 girls, who have all been planted out.  Mr. W. Williams, of the Chichester and Arethusa, has sent many more, and so have others, of whom I hope to hear tidings in the course of my travel.  The manager of Dr. Barnardo’s home at Peterborough, in answer to inquiries from the farmers and others, writes that boys from seven to twelve years of age are usually sent out on terms of adoption, to be treated in every respect as children of the household, and to receive, on attaining their twenty-first birthday, a sum of not less than one hundred and fifty dollars.  Boys of thirteen and over are hired as ‘helps,’ at wages varying from thirty-five to ninety-five dollars per annum, with lodging, food, and medical attendance.  Girls are sent out at ages ranging from four to sixteen years.  Those of eleven and under are usually adopted into families; while those of twelve and upwards are hired at wages from two dollars to nine dollars a month, with board, lodging, washing, and medical attendance.  The utmost care is taken that these children should be placed in good hands.  The applicant for a child has to get his letter recommended by a clergyman or magistrate; then he has to give his Christian name and surname in full, his address, his occupation; to say if he hires his farm, or if it is his own; whether he is a member of a Christian Church; what work the child will have to perform; on what terms the child comes into the family; what length of engagement is desired; what church the child will attend; and so on.

Moreover, Dr. Barnardo’s system provides for the regular and frequent visitation of every young emigrant at his or her place of employment; the girls by a lady of great experience, the boys by a gentleman.  By this means the children are never lost sight of, and trustworthy reports of their progress and whereabouts are periodically furnished to the heads of the institution in England.

Now, I call attention to this plan, not merely to increase confidence in the labours of philanthropists who are sending out children to Canada, but in order to raise the question, why it is only the children of the destitute and the wild arabs of the street that are to have this advantage.  There must be many poor people in England who have sons, perhaps a little too plucky for home, who could pay to send out their lads, and would be glad to do so, if they saw a chance of their being placed in good hands.  There are many boys who would be glad to leave the somewhat overcrowded house, and who would rejoice to fight the battle of life in the New World under such advantageous conditions.  Why should they not have a chance?  Why should the destitute only be looked after?  Why should not some one in the same way lend a helping hand to the honest son of the honest working man?  It may be that his father may be too old to emigrate.  It may be that he is doing fairly well at home, and that it is not worth his while to emigrate.  But why should not his son have a chance, and be sent out under a system as excellent as that to which I have referred?  Assuredly that is a question to be asked by others.

But Dr. Barnardo says in his magazine, Night and Day, that much injury to the work of emigration has been effected by supposing that boys who have committed grave moral faults can do well, if only shipped off to Canada.  He contends that a number of young fellows of that sort sent to Canada, would seriously prejudice the prospects of emigration generally; and he urges in very strong terms that none but boys and girls of thoroughly good physique, industrious, honest, and of good general character, should be encouraged to emigrate upon any pretext whatever.

Previous to my leaving Toronto I had the pleasure of an interview with the Hon. Edward Blake, the head of the Opposition, whose utterances are watched and waited for by all parties in the State with breathless interest.  Travelling from Winnipeg, I had listened to a conversation on that gentleman’s merits by two young gentlemen—who were a little incoherent in their language, owing to the quantity of refreshment they had on board—which certainly somewhat raised my expectations.  Nor was I disappointed on my personal interview with the subject of their praise.

The Hon. Edward Blake is a man in the prime of life, of fresh complexion, of more than average height and build, with a keen and intellectual face.  He was born in Canada, was educated at the University, followed his father in the profession of the bar, and as a cross-examiner, especially of an unwilling witness, and in the art of turning a man inside out, may claim to have no equal in Canada at the present time.  He has visited Europe more than once—at one time in an official capacity—has mixed with our public men as well as with those of the Continent, has been in office, and, it is believed, will soon be in office again.  He received me with great courtesy, and talked on things in general in a lively and interesting manner.  On the Province of Ontario as a home for the British farmer he had much to say.

Taking me to the map hanging up in his office, and pointing to the district between Toronto and Detroit, he affirmed that there was no finer land to be found anywhere in the United States.  His first constituency was a very poor one—consisting of English settlers and others who had gone there with very little, if any, money, and they had all done well, and their children were now mostly wealthy men.  He did not approve of the Government plan of emigration; but he did think there was a fine field in Canada for the British farmer and his men.  As to mechanics, he thought the look-out was poor.  The mechanic in that part of the world leads a very migratory life.  Such was the facility offered by railways, which ran in all directions, that a slight rise in the rate of wages would send him wherever that rise was to be found.  At the present time there was a depression of trade in the United States, and wages were low.  In Canada the wages were a little higher, and he looked to an emigration from the United States; and then the wages in Canada would go down.

The British mechanic would thus have to face a double difficulty—the competition of the Canadian and the American mechanic alike.  I must add, however, that this was not the view of an English mechanic who had been settled in Toronto some years, and with whom, subsequently, I had some chat.  His opinion was that any first-class English mechanic who came out would do well, while he frankly admitted that an inferior hand would have no chance whatever.

But to return to Mr. Blake.  It is evident, though he and his party are supposed to be in favour of Free Trade—and it is a matter of fact that they were driven from place and power by a Protectionist outcry—that he does not consider the question of Free Trade from an English standpoint at all.  It will be long ere Canada will lift up her voice in favour of Free Trade.  In Canada there is no such thing as direct taxation, and as money has to be raised for the support of Government, it is felt it is easier to do that by means of a duty on foreign manufactures than by taking it directly out of the pockets of the people.

Just now there is a feeling growing up in favour of Free Trade with America; but that will not aid the British manufacturer one jot.  The system of duties between Canada and America is an enormous nuisance, when one thinks of the daily personal and commercial intercourse between the two countries.  For instance, I lost by changing English money into Canadian dollars; and then again, when I had to change Canadian dollars into American greenbacks, I had to submit to a further loss.  This was not pleasant, especially when you remember that every time you cross the frontier—and people are doing it daily—you have to submit to a disagreeable examination on the part of Custom House officers.  Surely Canada and America will before long have to come to a better understanding than that which at present exists.  Of course, I write under correction.  I am an outsider.

‘Can you tell me,’ I said to the Hon. E. Blake, ‘how I am to get to a knowledge of Canadian politics?’

His reply, and it was delivered with a smile, was:

‘By living in the country some five or six years.’

Under such circumstances I feel, with the poet, that ‘where ignorance is bliss ’tis folly to be wise.’

On one thing Mr. Blake was silent—nor did I allude to it: that was the question of Canadian independence.  It is raised in many quarters, it is almost daily discussed in the Canadian newspapers.  People are waiting to hear what Mr. Blake has to say on it.  At present the oracle is dumb.  When the question is settled you may be sure sentiment will have little to do with it; on this side of the Atlantic, at any rate, that sort of thing goes a very little way when the almighty dollar is at stake.  But the question to be asked is, How long Canadian independence will stand the cry for annexation with the United States that will then be raised?

One of the pleasures attending my visit to Toronto was the finding out Mrs. Moodie—whose ‘Roughing It in the Bush’ did so much to help English people to understand the hardships of Canadian life some forty years ago.  She was the youngest sister of Agnes Strickland; and, like her, wrote books for children, and tales and poems for the annuals, then the rage.  She then married a Major Moodie, and went out to Canada, and I had not seen her since I was a raw lad; but of her kindness and her talent I had a distinct impression, and it was with real pleasure that I found her living at an advanced age—but in peace and comfort—at her son’s, a gentleman connected with the Inter-Colonial Railway.  The sprightly lady of 1834, eager and enthusiastic, had become an elderly one in 1884; yet time had dealt gently with her, and her youth seemed to me to revive as she talked of her old Suffolk home, and of men and women long since gone over to the majority.

I was glad to find that she had made her mark in Canadian literature.  An intelligent Canadian critic, Mr. J. E. Collins, whose acquaintance I was privileged to make—as well as that of his friend, Mr. Charles Robins, a poet of whom Canada may well be proud—writes of Mrs. Moodie: ‘So perfect a picture is Mrs. Moodie’s book of the struggles, the hopes, the dark days, and the sun-spots of that obscure life that fell to her lot in the forest depths, that its whisperings form a delightful music to the memory.  The style is limpid as a running brook, picturesque, and abounding with touches that show a keen insight into character, and an accurate observation of external things.  There is no padding or fustian in the book, and no word is squandered, Mrs. Moodie regarding the mission of language to be to convey thought, not to put on a useless parade.’

Mrs. Moodie has been living in Canada now fifty years, and loves to talk of the old country, especially of the people with whom she associated when, as Susannah Strickland, she used to stay in London with Pringle, the Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, whose beautiful poem, ‘Afar in the desert I love to ride,’ is still a favourite with the English public.  But she has no wish to come back to England—her family are all well settled in Canada.  She lives with one of her sons, and her daughter, Mrs. Chamberlain, of Ottawa, has won deserved fame by her beautiful illustrations of Canadian flowers and lichens.

English readers who may remember Mrs. Moodie as one of the gifted Strickland sisters will be glad to learn that she is regarded as one of the pioneers of Canadian literature, and although born near the beginning of the present century, possesses a mental vigour and active memory rare in one so aged.  She told me anecdotes of myself when a boy that I had quite forgotten, and retains in old age the enthusiasm for which she was remarkable when young.  Some of her ghost-stories were capital.  For instance, one night, when her sister Agnes was lying sick, in the old hall at Reydon, Suffolk, and was being nursed by her sister Jane, there came to them a tall, stately figure in white, with long garments trailing behind her.  Of course, Agnes and her sister were very much frightened at the apparition, which stood at the door, pointed her finger at Agnes, hissed at her, and then disappeared.  Other stories followed, equally interesting, in which Mrs. Moodie, it was evident, firmly believed.

It was during her long and lonely residence in the woods that Mrs. Moodie performed most of her literary work.  While her husband was away crushing the Rebellion, she wrote her ‘Roughing It in the Bush,’ which did more to establish her fame in Canada and in England than any of her previous productions.  It is probably the best picture we have of Canadian life at that time, and written in a style of composition charming, if only on account of its ease.  Undisturbed by household cares, she wrote no less than fifteen books for children; a larger work, ‘Life in the Clearings,’ and in addition contributed a mass of matter to the old Canadian Literary Garland, sufficient to fill several large volumes.  ‘I remember seeing Carlyle once,’ she said, ‘but he was such a crabbed-looking man that I did not care to make his acquaintance.  In fact, his appearance was quite the reverse of pleasing, but he was an honest, close-fisted man, I dare say.’  She had a good deal to say of Cruikshank, who lived next door to Pringle.  ‘I went to hear Dan O’Connell,’ she continued, ‘on the Anti-Slavery question.  He was completely dressed in green—green coat, green vest, green pants—everything green but his boots.  I was greatly amused at his opening remark, “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “England reminds me in this great question of a large lion that has been sleeping a good many years, commencing to rouse itself, stretch, yawn, and wag its tail.”  For days after, that lion, with its wagging tail, came visibly before me.’  She also remembered Shiel, who began his speech in Exeter Hall, then quite a new building, by saying that he was afraid he would not be able to make himself heard, and then roared so that he might have been heard at Somerset House.  She saw the man in armour proclaim King William in Cheapside, and it touched her to tears when all the people cried: ‘God save the King!’  ‘At one time,’ she said, ‘I helped Pringle to edit one of his annuals.  Proctor sent in his poem on “The Sea, the Sea,” and after reading it I recommended it for publication, but Pringle rejected it.  However, afterwards he found out his mistake when the poem, published in another channel, brought fame to its author.’

Mrs. Moodie seemed to think that it was a great privilege to have been in London while the Catholic Emancipation Act and the Reform Bills were carried, and still in her comfortable house in Toronto loves to talk of the bustle and excitement of the time.  I was privileged twice to see her, and then we parted, never more to meet—in this world, at least.

Near Peterborough, about a hundred and fifty miles from Toronto, I found another far-famed Canadian authoress, Mrs. Traill, whose ‘Backwoods of Canada,’ published when I was a lad by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, and now, I believe, by Messrs. Routledge and Sons, was a delight to me in my young days.  I remember her well as a young woman, tall and stately, with a wonderful flow of talk—enthusiastic as a worshipper of nature—ever ready to write of Suffolk lanes, with all their richness of floral and animal life; of Suffolk copses, where the birds sang, and the partridge and the pheasant and the timid hare found shelter; of farmers, then merry, and of peasants, then contented with their humble lot.

In person she was attractive, the most so, to my mind, of all the Strickland family, and she was very stately in manner, for was not her maiden name Katherine Parr Strickland, and had she not some of the blood of that family allied to royalty in her veins?  The Stricklands came of an ancient and honoured line, and besides that, there is a great deal in names, as the reader of ‘Tristram Shandy’ and ‘Kenelm Chillingly’ perfectly understands.  What could you expect of a Katherine Parr Strickland but queenly manner, as assuredly the young lady who bore that name had?

When I was a lad, she married a Major Traill, and accompanied her sister, Mrs. Moodie, to Canada.  I cannot think how ladies thus tenderly nursed could have done anything of the kind—or, having done it, how they could have survived the hardships they were called to endure.  The lot in their case was by no means cast in pleasant places.  Mrs. Moodie, in her delightful book, ‘Roughing It in the Bush,’ says: ‘A large number of the immigrants were officers of the army and navy, with their families—a class perfectly unfitted by their previous habits and standing in society for contending with the stern realities of emigrant life in the backwoods.  A class formed mainly from the younger scions of great families, naturally proud, and not only accustomed to command, but to receive implicit obedience from the people under them, are not men adapted to the hard toil of the woodman’s life.’

Yet it was to such a life Major Traill took his handsome and accomplished wife; but Mrs. Traill in her backwoods settlement was not forgetful of the literary vocation to which she had dedicated her early youth.  I have already referred to her ‘Backwoods of Canada’; that was in due time followed by a volume equally worthy of public favour, under the title of ‘Ramblings in a Canadian Forest.’  Indeed, she and her sister may claim to have been the pioneers of Canadian literature; and their brother, Lieutenant-Colonel Strickland, may also claim to be placed in that category by his work, ‘Twenty-seven Years in Canada West,’ a record of his own experiences, abounding with numerous realistic touches.  He settled his family near his sister; and at Lakefield, near Peterborough, the residence of Mrs. Traill, there is quite a colony of Stricklands, who have all done well, so people tell me, at the lumber trade.

I am glad I paid Mrs. Traill a visit.  It was a long and wearisome ride, but I was well repaid by a short interview with one with whom I was familiar half a century back.  Lakefield is a charming spot, and Mrs. Traill’s wooden but picturesque cottage overlooks a lovely scene of trees and hills, and water and grass.  At any rate, in the early spring it has a neat little garden; in new countries neat little gardens are rare.

Mrs. Traill has seen great changes in her time.  When she came there, there were only one or two houses in Peterborough; all was forest, and now it has a mayor and a town-hall, and is one of the nicest towns in that part of Canada.  Mrs. Traill’s cottage is fitted up with English comfort and taste.  She has around her books and photographs of loving relatives.  She showed me a book of hers recently published by Messrs. Nelson and Sons.  As a Canadian authoress, she has done much to commemorate the beauty of Canadian forests, and writes of their floral charms with all the tenderness and grace with which I remember her sketches of East Anglian rural life were richly adorned.  She is now hard at work with a new volume on Canadian lichens and flowers.

As we stood talking at the window—the sunbeams played gaily on the blue waters of the lake or river beneath (in Canada there are so many rivers and lakes that you can scarcely tell which is which, or where the one ends or the other begins)—fairy flowers were beginning to gem her lawn; and the American robin redbreast, a far larger bird than ours, and other birds, still more graceful, flew among the trees—I felt how, in such a spot, one weary of the world could lead a tranquil life.

Mrs. Traill must be an advanced octogenarian—she is older than Mrs. Moodie, and Mrs. Moodie claims to be far over eighty.  Yet Mrs. Traill retains her conversational power intact, and is full as ever of ‘the lore that nature brings,’ and is as enthusiastic as ever in its pursuit.  As much as ever her manners are queenlike.  They have never left her, in spite of all the hardships she has had to undergo as wife and mother in the wilderness, and her face still retains something of the freshness and fairness of her youth.  She is a wonderful old lady, and Canada must be a wonderful country for such.

CHAPTER VI.

OFF TO THE NORTH-WEST—NIAGARA—LAKE SUPERIOR—THE CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILWAY—AT WINNIPEG.

As in duty bound, I have reached Niagara Falls, and from motives equally conscientious forbear to trouble you with either poetry or prose on the scene that now meets my eye.  In seeing them I have an advantage—that in this early season of the year I am alone and free from the crowd of visitors that sometimes infest the spot.  As it is, there is quite enough of modern civilization there to disturb the poetry of the place; and the scream of the steam-engine sadly interferes with the enjoyment of that everlasting roar which rises as the vast body of waters tumbles over the falls—raising up majestic mountains of mist—and then sweeps grandly to the rapids, in the raging whirlpools of which poor Captain Webb lost his life, or, in plainer words, committed suicide.  Then there are the cabmen, who will not give you a moment’s peace, and affect not to understand you when you intimate that you prefer to walk rather than to ride; and a grand walk it is, about a mile from the station on the Canadian side.  Far, far below is the river—a chasm in a mass of old dark rock—into which you peer with wondering eyes till the brain is almost dizzy.  Words fail to convey the impressions, as passing cloud and fleeting sunshine add to the marvellous beauty of the spot.  I scrambled down to where the ferry-boat is, and drank in all the charm of the place, not caring to be ferried across, quite satisfied with watching the eternal fall of water as I sat there—a mere human speck in that mysterious grandeur.  The white man has come and made the place his own.  He has now thrown three bridges across it, and on the American side has built a brewery, whose ‘Niagara ales’ are famous all over the American Continent.  I am glad to say that it is only on the Canadian side that you have a good view of the Falls; but on neither side is there what there ought to be, a wilderness.  On each side there are houses and hotels, and churches, all the way; and I was offered Guinness’s Dublin Stout and Bass’s Pale Ale, just as if I were dining in a Fleet Street restaurant.  On my return I met a funeral procession.  Death had come into one of the wooden houses on the side, and the friends and relatives had ridden in their buggies and country carts to pay the last tribute of respect to the deceased.  Yes; death is lord of life—in the New World as well as in the Old.

I went then by way of Hamilton, through a district as fertile and as well-farmed as any in England, looking far more civilized than any part I have yet seen.  There are no stumps of trees in the ground, as there are elsewhere, and the houses look as if they had been built long enough to allow of home comforts; and, as Hamilton is the place to which many of our poor lads are sent, I was glad to feel that in such a district they would have few hardships to encounter, and would have every chance of getting on.  Here at one time there were bears and wolves; but they have long since disappeared before the march of their master, man.  It is not so long since there was quail shooting on the very site of the city of Toronto, and hawks would carry off the chickens the earlier emigrants were attempting painfully to rear, and the Indians were also unwelcome guests.  I have heard of an old Scotch settler who, as his last resort, invoked the aid of bagpipes, wherewith to frighten his unwelcome guests; but even that did not frighten the Indians, who carried off the contents of his potato ground, undisturbed by a musical performance which would have struck terror into the stoutest English heart.  Well, all that wild forest region is now the home of peace and plenty, and distant be the day when Professor Goldwin Smith’s idea will be realized, and it has been peacefully annexed by the United States.  Out in Canada that idea finds little favour.  Why should it?  It is a favourite boast with Americans that Canada will ultimately be theirs.  I am sure that is not a favourite idea of the Canadians themselves.  Great Britain, it is to be hoped, will be as loyal to Canada as Canada is to her.

The thing is not to be settled quite so easily as Professor Goldwin Smith anticipates.  In Quebec Province we have a million of French Canadians, who make no secret of their preference to a French rather than an English alliance, and who are quite prepared to act accordingly, as soon as British authority shall have become relaxed.  Then we have the Acadians of Nova Scotia, who would probably follow the lead of French Canada; nor could the few Britishers of New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island escape the same fate.  France is quite prepared to increase her influence in this part of the world.  Indeed, at the present moment there is talk of her buying the island of Anticosti, which, as you may be aware, though almost uninhabited now—save in the summer, when the fishermen go there—makes a very respectable appearance in the river St. Lawrence.  Then we come to Ontario, which, placed as she is, could not withstand an attack from the United States.

Once upon a time the Yankees did make an attempt of the kind—that was in 1837—an attempt which the loyal men of Canada helped Sir Francis Head to put down.  Toronto escaped, though she had the enemy at her very gates.  I must say that all the Canadians with whom I have spoken have no wish to become Americans.  For one thing, they say they can’t afford it.  Government is more costly in America than in Canada.  I admit as much as anyone the right of the people to decide their fate.  If the Canadians prefer to live under the star-spangled banner, it is vain for us to attempt to retain them.  But the danger is the indifference of the English public as to the value of such a colony as that of Canada, a country bigger than all Europe, and at present with a sparse population only equalling that of London.  A few brief facts will show the importance of the North-West to the English, not merely as a field for emigration, but for other reasons as well.

From Liverpool to Winnipeg, viâ Hudson’s Bay, the distance is less by 1,100 miles than by way of the St. Lawrence, and they are now talking of making a railway along that route.  From Liverpool to China and Japan, viâ the northern route, the distance is 1,000 miles shorter than by any other line.  It is really 2,000 miles shorter than by San Francisco and New York.  How immense, then, will be the power which the possession of Hudson’s Bay, and of the railway route through to the Pacific, must confer upon Great Britain, so long as she holds it under safe control!—and where is the nation that can prevent her so holding it, as long as her fleets command the North Atlantic?  It is utterly inconceivable that English statesmen would be found so mad or so unpatriotic as thus to throw away the key of the world’s commerce, by neglecting or surrendering British interests in the North-West.  Our great cities would not sanction such a policy for an instant.  England could better afford to give up the Suez Canal, or be rid of her South African colonies.  The interests of the two countries are inseparable.  We require the North-West to send us grain.  She requires us as her best customer.  Manitoba has her natural market in Great Britain, and in the near future Great Britain will have her best customers in Manitoba and the North-Western Provinces.

It is to the credit of the Canadians—that is, if figures may be trusted—that they spend less on drink, and more on education, than we do in the Old Country.

Party feeling runs high; but it is difficult to an outsider to understand what is the line of separation between the ins and the outs.  An English writer tells us that she once asked a member of the Greek Opposition in Parliament, what was the difference between them and the Government.  ‘Why,’ was his reply, ‘it is this.  If M. Tricoupi says we want railroads, we say, “No; we want canals.”  If he says a thing must be done by horses, we say, “No; it must be done by oxen.”’  It is just the same here.  What one party proposes the other opposes.  The present rulers rode into power on the wings of Protection.  They are Tories; but it is to be feared the Liberals would have done the same, had they had a chance.  It is the fashion to use very bad language, and to imply the worst of motives to your opponents; and it is in this easy way the Canadian newspapers fill up their columns when they are not—and this seems their great mission—quarrelling with one another.

The country farmers, who are much keener men of business than their fellow farmers in the Old Country, care little about politics.  At the last election a friend of mine said to a farmer, ‘Have you voted?’  ‘Oh yes!’ was the reply.  ‘Well, for which party?’  Ah, that was a question he could not answer.  He had voted as his neighbour told him; and he knew that his neighbour was a real good man, and that he would not give him bad advice.  So long as voters are thus simple, elections will be a mockery and a sham.

I have left Toronto behind, and here I am on Lake Superior, the largest body of fresh water in the world—so large is it, that if you immerse in it Great Britain and Ireland, and add the Isle of Man and the Isle of Wight, there would still be a respectable amount of water to spare—enough, at any rate, to make a river as long as the Thames, which we in England hold to be a very decent sort of river indeed.  As I came up the St. Lawrence, some of the Canadians, who are, as they may well be, proud of their grand river, asked me what I thought of it.  My reply was that for a colony so young, it was a very tidy sort of river indeed; and I may say the same of the enormous body of water on which I am now floating.  It is a big thing indeed—as might be expected, where both Canada and the United States contribute to its bigness.  We are in the middle of the lake, having Michigan on one side.  Already we have stopped twice—once to take a pilot, and then again at Le Sault, where we had to stay while we waited our turn to enter the canal which connects the Georgian Bay to Lake Superior.  There, indeed, we were made conscious of the fact that we were within the United States, as the banner of the stars and stripes floated proudly on each side of us, and there were a few soldiers in blue regimentals standing on the wharf, to say nothing of loafers, and boys and girls and half-breeds, to welcome our arrival.

For one thing I felt proud of my country.  The Americans have nothing here equal to the Algoma, a crack steamer built on the Clyde for the Canadian Pacific Railway, and to which, at this present moment, are entrusted Cæsar and his fortunes.  It is only the second trip the Algoma has made, as for the greater season of the year this immense water-way, incredible as it seems to us, is a solid block of ice, and we have it all around us still.  I boarded the Algoma on Saturday afternoon, after a rapid run by rail from Toronto, which city we left in the morning at half-past eleven, and I assure you I was glad the journey was safely over, as once or twice it seemed to me, at one or two of the curves, the cars were very near leaving the rails; and the boy—they are all boys here—who had to attend to the brake, gave me a grin, as if he thought that we had much to be thankful for that we kept the track at all.  I presume I shall get used to that sort of thing, but at present the sensation experienced in rounding some of the curves is more novel than agreeable.

We are a very miscellaneous company on board, chiefly Toronto traders and stalwart boys from Manitoba, who have been enjoying a holiday in Upper Canada, and emigrants.  Gloves are unknown, likewise hats and shirt-collars are the exception rather than the rule.  As to having one’s boots blackened, that is rather an expensive luxury, when you recollect the charge is fivepence a pair, and no one on board apparently has had his boots blackened for the last week or two; and I question much whether I shall require any of Day and Martin till I get back to Toronto again—an event which will take place apparently about the time of the Greek kalends.  Hitherto I have managed the blacking difficulty most effectively.  As far as Toronto I travelled with my London friend, who, aware of the custom of the country, had provided himself with the needful materials for the fitting amount of polish, and who generously permitted me to reap the benefit of his superior knowledge.  My first attempt, I fear, was a failure.  In my bedroom at the hotel I set to work, and soon acquired the requisite amount of polish; but, alas! I had forgotten the effect of blacking on clean sheets, and to my horror I discovered the bed-linen was, at any rate, as plentifully covered with blacking as ‘them precious boots.’  However, I did not regret the catastrophe, as I hoped it might teach the landlord it would be cheaper to get the boots of his guests blackened in an efficient manner, than to leave such unskilful amateurs as myself to do it on their own account.

Life on board the Algoma is as agreeable as can well be imagined.  We have three good meals a day.  I am writing in a magnificent saloon, nearly three hundred feet long, and if the nights are cold, as they always are on the lakes, I have a cabin all to myself, and by heaping the bed-clothes for two berths on my bed, and throwing a heavy great-coat over them, I manage to keep myself warm for the night.  The scenery by day is magnificent, as we sail in and out among a thousand isles, all richly wooded to the water’s edge, with here and there a little village, or small settlement, where the woodmen ply their calling—the results of which may be seen now in a raft being towed by a tug, to be shipped lower down to Liverpool or Glasgow, or in stacks of planks along the shore.  Further behind is the mainland, with rock and wood in endless succession.  At Sault St. Marie, the river is celebrated for its fish, and as you pass through the canal, you have plenty of Indian canoes paddling about, with a man at the stern to seize the fish by a hand-net: the white fish of Lake Superior is held to be a great delicacy.  After a day and night, we get into the open lake, out of sight of land, and then we land at Port Arthur, whence we take the train to Winnipeg, where I hope to hear a scrap of English news.

I have but one complaint to make, and that is, on the Sunday we had no service of any kind.  I am not, nor ever was, a stickler for forms; but there are times, especially as many now on board may be planted far away from any religious observance, when it seems to me a simple service might be the means of strengthening old impressions, and perhaps planting new ones.  One thinks of that fine old hymn of Andrew Marvel’s:

‘What can we do but sing His praise,
Who guides us through the watery maze?’

And an hour or so thus spent, surely may be quite as helpful to the higher life we all dream of, at any rate, as the favourite occupation of the majority—smoking and spitting, or the study of the maps of the district to which we are all rapidly approaching.  I had a queer chat this morning with an old Canadian farmer who landed at Le Sault.  He was pleased to hear that I had been at Yarmouth in Norfolk.  His mother was a Clarke of Yarmouth.  Did I know any of the Clarkes of Yarmouth?  I replied that I had not that pleasure, but that I knew many of the Clarkes, and that they were a highly-respectable family indeed.

Well, I have now done with Ontario, and you ask me what I think of it?  I reply that it is a beautiful country, and that it has room for any amount of farm labourers and servant girls.  I have been talking with a gentleman this morning, who tells me that he pays his groom about £6 a month, and that he boards him as well.  He tells me of a Scotch labourer who came out without £1 in his pocket, and who has just died worth £12,000.

At Ottawa I saw a large lumber-yard worth many thousand pounds, which was the property of one who came from England as a working man.  As to mechanics, I fear the case is different.  In Ontario, in all the towns, the mechanics have strong unions, and they do all they can to keep out emigrants of that class, fearing that their own wages will be reduced.  This dog-in-the-manger policy prevails everywhere, and many mechanics, directly they land, are thus frightened by them, and want to get back to England at once.  There are two sides to every question.  All I can say is, that while a mechanic’s representative, at Montreal, was telling me that there was no room for mechanics, and was doing all he could to induce those who came out with me to return to England at once, I saw an advertisement with my own eyes in a local paper (I am sorry I have forgotten the name) for five hundred mechanics, who were immediately wanted.  A man who has got a good situation in England would be a fool to give it up and come out; but I believe a mechanic who has a head on his shoulders—who is young and in good health, and knows how to take advantage of his situation—may find a living even in Ontario.  This is my deliberate conviction, after all I have seen and heard, and with the full knowledge that in Montreal, and Ottawa, and Toronto, there is a pauper class as badly off as any of the denizens of our London slums.  The people I most pity are the young fellows who in England have had the training of gentlemen, and who are sadly out of place in Canada, and whom the Canadian mothers dread, fearing that they may corrupt the native youth.  Many of them, however, are decent fellows; but nevertheless, there is no room for them, unless they go out to Manitoba, and get some farmer to give them board and lodging for their work.  I parted with quite a pang with one such on Friday, at Toronto.  He was the nephew of a well-known noble lord, and really seemed a very decent sort of fellow.  ‘What can you do?’ I said to him.  ‘Oh, I can row and play cricket,’ was his reply.  Unfortunately, Canada is not much of a country for cricket—the summer season is too short; and I felt that my young friend, unless he could turn his hand to something more useful or lucrative, had better have remained at home.

The pleasant steamship journey ended, I landed at Port Arthur—a town situated in one of the loveliest bays I have yet seen, almost surrounded by weird and fantastic rocks—with a view to run by the Canadian Pacific as far as Winnipeg.  As I landed a bill met my eye: ‘Wanted, a hundred rock-men and fifty labourers;’ and that seemed to me an indication that emigrants need not go begging for work in that particular locality.  Port Arthur, which stands near the ancient Hudson Bay Company’s station of Fort William, was in a state of intense activity.  Every one was building wooden houses and shops who could do so.  According to all appearances, it is certainly a busy place; but architecturally I cannot say that it is of much account.  The main street opens on to the railway, along which the engines, ringing a doleful bell in order to bid passengers keep out of the way, pass every few minutes.  Then there are wooden shops and wooden hotels, and the usual concourse of rough, unwashed, half-dressed loafers in the streets.  Behind them is the forest and in front the bay, with its waters almost as clear as those of the Baltic, and almost as blue as those of Naples.  Yet I certainly got very heartily tired of Port Arthur, and so, I am sure, did all my travelling companions, who sat on the planks or on the wooden pavement, which, being raised above the road, made passable seats, or on the bits of rock which the railway builders had been too busy to remove, wondering at what hour the train would start.  I pitied the poor emigrants, with their children, and their beds, and their household furniture, as they sat there, hour after hour, in that hot and sandy street.  We landed at eleven, having made the whole distance from Toronto—a run of about eight hundred miles—in exactly two days and two nights—not quite so long as Jonah was in the whale’s belly, but we certainly got over more ground than he did.  When were we to start?  No one knew.  It takes a long time to get out £4,000 worth of freight and passengers’ luggage, and that is what the Algoma had on board.  The worst of railway travelling in Canada is that there is no one of whom you can ask a question.  There may be a station-master, there may be a whole herd of officials, there may be an army of porters, but Canadians in one respect resemble the Americans—and that is, that they think it inconsistent with their manly dignity to wear any kind of garb which can in any possible way distinguish them from the crowd of lookers-on, always to be met with in a railway station, so that the railway traveller is always in a perplexity.  When we got on shore we were told that we should start in half an hour.  Then came word that we were to be off at half-past one, and so, as soon as the cars were made up, we joyfully climbed into them—and the steps are in many cases so high that it is hard work climbing into them; but still we were no further on our way, and it was not till a little before four that, after many false starts, we could fairly believe that we were off.  Oh, it was wearisome work, but then it may be asked, Whoever travels on a railway for pleasure?  It is true these big American cars have certain advantages ours lack.  You can change your position; you can talk without breaking a blood-vessel; and you can see more of the country, especially as they do not go the pace we are accustomed to at home; but there is such a confusion of persons in them, that to one accustomed to the society to be met with in an English first-class carriage, the result is anything but pleasing.  In the Canadian first-class carriage Jack and his master ride side by side, unless the latter takes a berth in a sleeping car, for which he has to pay extra.  As I did not feel inclined to give three dollars for a night’s unquiet rest, I took my chance with the first-class car company, and I can assure you that by the time the dim grey of morning glimmered on the horizon, I had heartily repented of my decision.  The night was so cold that everything in the way of ventilation was stopped up.  The car was quite full, and few of my fellow travellers seemed to have had much regard for soap and water.  It is true there was a lavatory attached to the car, but there was neither water nor soap nor towels, and the neatness of the lavatory in other respects only seemed to me to make matters worse.  I must say that the car, which was built in Canada, was a remarkably handsome one, with its dark wood panels beautifully carved, and its seats all lined with red velvet; yet when I left it in the morning it was in a filthy state.  I also found in it agreeable society, but there were many who could not truthfully be included in such a category—rough men and women with whom in England you would not care to travel in a third-class carriage: but I am an Englishman, and may be pardoned for not knowing any better.  It is to the same defect, perhaps, that I may trace the disappointment I felt at the refreshment sheds, in which we were permitted to snatch a hasty meal, waited on by a man in shirt-sleeves.  Certainly we do that part of our business better at home.  The Canadian Pacific have a dining-room of their own at Winnipeg, and there, if possible, the traveller should endeavour to secure a meal.

But oh, that ride! I shall never forget it.  Burns tells us that Nature tried her ’prentice hand on man

‘And then she made the lassies, oh!’

I think Nature must have made that part of Canada which lies between Port Arthur and Winnipeg before she tried her hand on Great Britain and Ireland.  It is true some part of it has an exquisite combination of wood and water and rock, but the greater part was either forest or gigantic plains or valleys of stone—which seemed to shut all hope from the spectator.  In Canada—that is, along the railway lines—there is little life in the forest, few flowers display their loveliness, and no song-birds warble in the trees.  All is still—or would be, were it not for the peculiar croaking of the frogs, to be heard like so many hoarse whistles from afar.  You go miles and miles without seeing a farm or even a log-hut.  In one place I saw an Indian wigwam, much resembling a gipsy’s tent, and a large canoe; but dwellings of any kind are the exception, not the rule.  The train every now and then stops, but you see no station, and why we stop is only known to the engine-driver.  We take no passengers up, and we set none down, or hardly ever.  The people who get in at Port Arthur only want to be taken to Winnipeg.  There is no traffic along the line, because there are no inhabitants along the line, and for the greater part of the way it is not only a solitary ride, but a rough one as well.  As you get nearer Winnipeg, the road is easier, and the pace is more rapid.  You leave behind you rocks and forests, and reach an open plain on which you see, perhaps, a dozen cows, where millions might fatten and feed.  A good deal of this land, I am told, belongs to the half-breeds.  In time it is to be hoped that they may utilize it more than they seem to do now.

A great change is impending over this part of the world.  Even that stony district of which I wrote, and which seemed to me as the abomination of desolation, is, I hear, full of mineral wealth, which will be brought to light as soon as a certain boundary difficulty is settled—Ontario and Manitoba at present are each contending for the prize—and the decision of the question must shortly take place.

Perhaps the one thing that has most struck me with admiration is the pluck which has given birth to the Canadian Pacific Railway, by means of which the emigrant is taken from his landing in Quebec to his destination on the slopes of the Pacific, without ever leaving the Canadian soil.  It is a patriotic enterprise, for under the former system the emigrant who intended to settle in Canada, and who, in reality, was wanted there, was often tempted to change his mind and to settle in the United States.  It was a bold enterprise, for the cost was enormous, and Canada is not a wealthy country.  It was an enterprise which was made the subject of party conflict.  Appalling difficulties have had to be surmounted by the engineers.  Yet all have been vanquished, and in a few months this grand scheme will be an accomplished fact, and you will be carried direct from one side of this enormous continent to the other.  I think Sir John Macdonald is to be congratulated for the courage and tenacity he has displayed on the subject, through good or bad report, and too much praise cannot be awarded to Mr. George Stephens, who has been the ruling spirit and life of the undertaking from the first, and I am sure that such railway officials as those I have met, such as Mr. Van Horne, have proved loyal coadjutors, evincing a similar wide grasp of mind and readiness of resource for which Sir John himself is distinguished.

In England they are well represented by Mr. Begg, who, as he knows the district well, can speak of it with a confidence and certainty possessed by no one else.  It is to him the credit must be given of the Manitoba farm in the Forestry Exhibition at Edinburgh last autumn, which was visited with much interest by the Prince of Wales and Mr. Gladstone, and to which I was glad to see, for I was there several days, the Scotch farmers and agriculturists paid particular attention.  Such men are an honour to Canada, and may be ranked amongst its best friends.  It is to them that Canada owes her present proud position and ability to find happy homes for the tens of thousands of England and the Continent, whom she has rescued from starvation, and whom she has placed in the way to insure wealth and health and happiness.  I find even poor persecuted Jews driven from Russia on this fertile land, who, under these favouring skies, have learned to become prosperous farmers.  One may well be proud of Canada, and be proud to think Canada belongs to us.  When Bret Harte asks,

‘Is our civilization a failure,
Is the Caucasian played out?’

I answer in Canada with an emphatic No!  Canada is redolent of industrial success.  The very air of the place is full of hope.

Not only has the Canadian Pacific Railway opened up the country, but it has established experimental farms in different parts, in order to test the capabilities of the soil and the advantages or disadvantages of the climate.  It is said, and extensively believed, that the soil between Moose Jaw and Calgary is made up of desert and alkali lands, and entirely unfit for cultivation.  With a view to correct that idea, ten farms were established at the following stations: 1, Secretan; 2, Rush Lake; 3, Swift Current; 4, Gull Lake; 5, Maple Creek; 6, Forres; 7, Dunmore; 8, Stair (these two being the nearest stations east and west of Medicine Hat at the crossing of the Saskatchewan River); 9, Tilley, and 10, Gleichen, the last being within view of the Rocky Mountains.  The breaking throughout was found to be easy, the soil in every case good and in most instances excellent, ranking with the choicest lands in the Company’s more eastern belt: wherever the rating of the soil is lowered, according to the Company’s standard, owing to its being of a lighter grade, the inferiority will be compensated for by the certainty of the grain maturing more rapidly.

In a pamphlet just issued it is stated that the average from all the farms was as follows:

‘Wheat 21½ bushels; oats, 44¼; barley, 23¼; peas, 12½.

‘The above yields were ascertained by accurately chaining the ground and weighing the grain, this work being done by a qualified Dominion Land Surveyor, and the results, both favourable and otherwise, have been fully given.

‘At each farm about one acre of spring wheat and oats were sown and harrowed in in the fall when breaking was done.  Much of this grain germinated during the mild weather of November and December, at which time it showed green above the ground, and as a consequence it was nearly all killed during the winter, and the ground had to be resown in spring.  Some small pieces of wheat which were not entirely killed out were left; and, though the straw showed a rank growth, with heads and grain much larger than that sown in spring, the crop ripened very unevenly and much later.  Fall sowing of spring wheat, which has proved successful in Manitoba, is not likely to be a success in the western country, as the winter is much more mild and open, and the grain liable to germinate and be killed.  Fall wheat has not, as far as we are aware, been tried, and there seems no reason why it should not prove successful.

‘The results obtained, considering the manner in which the land was treated, proved much more satisfactory than was anticipated, and show—

‘1st—That for grain growing, the land in this section of country is capable of giving as large a wheat yield per acre as the heavier lands of Manitoba.

‘2nd—That a fair crop can be obtained the first year of settlement on breaking.

‘3rd—That for fall seeding with spring grain on the western plains, a satisfactory result cannot be looked for with any degree of certainty.

‘4th—That cereals, roots, and garden produce can be successfully raised at an elevation of 3,000 feet above the sea-level.

‘5th—That seeding can be done sufficiently early to allow of all the crop being harvested before the first of September.’

And I hear of many who have done well—some of whom came out without a rap—and who enjoy a robust health unknown to them at home.

Perhaps nowhere has a village so suddenly sprung up into a city as at Winnipeg, which first obtained notoriety by the advent of Lord Garnet Wolseley, then a young man, who came to suppress the rebellion raised there by a half-breed of the name of Riel, a daring young French Canadian, wily as a savage, brilliant and energetic.  In 1870 he appealed to the prejudices and fears of the half-breeds, and in a few days had 400 men at his back.  Owing to the clemency—perhaps mistaken—of his captors, Riel escaped the punishment due to his crimes.  In 1873 he was enrolled as a member of Parliament, notwithstanding that at one time a reward of 5,000 dollars had been offered for his apprehension as a murderer.

The name of Winnipeg was then little known outside Manitoba.  It was built by traders, who wished to rival Fort Garrey, then the headquarters of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and to carry on a free trade on their own account.  After the suppression of the rebellion, Manitoba had a local Parliament, which met at Winnipeg, and also sent its representatives to the Dominion Parliament.  The place grew rapidly, though even at that time Mr. Mackenzie, Sir John Macdonald’s political opponent, declared that a cart track was good enough for Manitoba for many years to come.  In 1875 the total population was 3,031 assessed and 2,000 non-assessed, which was a pretty respectable increase, considering that in 1869 there were hardly a hundred settlers in the place.  As late as 1876 the sport of wolf-hunting was carried on by several of the inhabitants just outside the city.  Now it has churches, banks, schools, manufactures, and mercantile men of great energy and high standing; and has become, especially since the Pacific Railway Company has made it one of their great stations, the gateway of the North-West.  Settlers came crowding in from all quarters, and in ten months, in 1878, 600,592 acres of land were located.  In 1879 Winnipeg boasted of a street extension of 83 miles, and then came the bridge over the Red River to render the town easy of access to all new-comers.  Intoxicated with success, what the Americans call a ‘boom’ was created a year or two since, which seemed to have made everyone lose his wits.  There was no end to speculation in town lots; merchants, tradesmen, professional men, could think of nothing else.  The bottom, however, soon fell out, and at this time Winnipeg is in rather a depressed state; but it is clear, from its peculiar position, that this depression can only be temporary.  It is destined to be the great distributing and railway centre of the vast North-West.  The town has now a population of 26,000, and three daily papers, besides weekly ones.  Ten years hence, it is predicted, she will be ten times her present size.  Her wharves will be lined with steamboats; her river-banks with elevators; industries and manufactures will spring up in her midst, and her streets will be fuller of life than they are to-day.

Winnipeg stands low, and at certain seasons—that is, when the thaw commences—it is liable to floods; but the air is singularly pure and bracing—while I write the sky is an azure blue—and the hottest days are followed by cool nights.  The inhabitants all seem to be in the possession of good health.  Then the water was said to be bad, whereas I find it to be quite the reverse.  The supply of gas is poor, and it seems rarely used.  The one great drawback is Winnipeg mud.

The streets, all of them, are as broad as Portland Place, only with handsomer shops.  I fear in wet weather they must be almost impassable.  As it is, the sides are now dried up, as if they were ploughed, and carriages seem to make their way with considerable difficulty; but there is a magnificent broad wooden side walk to all the streets, while in the middle sufficient smoothness has been attained for the due working of street railways, which seem to be in a satisfactory condition.  I have also been agreeably disappointed with the hotels, which I was told were all bad and all tremendously dear.  On the contrary, I have found in the new Douglas Hotel, in the main street, as good accommodation as I require, and at a very reasonable rate; while the proprietor—Mr. Bennett, a worthy Scotchman—does all he can for the comfort of his guests, having introduced into this far distant land all the latest improvements, such as heating the place by steam and the use of electric bells.

A walk in the city is amusing.  Grand shops and well-built offices everywhere attract the eye.  Ladies in the latest fashion meet you one minute, and the next you jostle a swarthy Indian, half civilized, and his squaw, still less civilized than himself.  Odd fur-skins are exposed for sale, while a stuffed bear adorns the main street, up and down which run all day long the newsboys with the latest telegrams from London, or Paris, or New York.  To-day I have seen a photograph of the original fireman of the ‘Rocket,’ who lives here, and has made a large fortune by contracts.  Unfortunately, at this time he is absent from home, and I fear I shall not have a chance of interviewing him.  Religion flourishes here.  There are about fifteen churches and chapels in the city, and the Young Men’s Christian Association is in a very successful condition.  Of Protestant bodies, the leading ones are the Presbyterians, the Methodists, and the Episcopalians.  In connection with the Cathedral of St. Boniface, the oldest church in the city, it is interesting to note that the bells came originally from Birmingham, by Hudson’s Bay, and that after the destruction of the building the remains of the metal were gathered up and sent to Birmingham, whence they have again come back after an interval of three years.  The city stands in the midst of a fertile plain, adequate to the support of any amount of population.  But the land is far better further on.  At Manitoba, for instance, the soil is much finer.  Manitoba is an Indian name denoting the Voice of God.  It seems that the rocks on the river are cavernous, and that at certain seasons of the year the wind strikes them with such force as to produce a singular reverberation, which the rude Indian, whose untutored mind teaches him to see God in the cloud and hear Him in the wind, considered to be no less than the utterance of the Deity Himself.

Just now people are rather exercised with the Indians, who have been placed in reserves where they cannot get a living, and who, besides, find their location an unhealthy swamp.  One of the Winnipeg journals is very indignant, and says this is what may be expected from the Government.  From all I can learn, the Indians are sturdy maintainers of their rights, and take care that the Government shall not easily overreach them; and perhaps, on the whole, the Indians are better off under Canadian than they would be under American government.  Indeed, people say they are very good fellows when uncorrupted by Englishmen.  The emigrant in these parts must not be surprised at the occasional appearance of an Indian; and perhaps it is well that the farmer takes care of his horses.  I am sorry for the poor Indian, who is the original owner of the soil, and whom, perhaps, one day Mr. Henry George may see fit to visit with a view to the recovery of his rights and the redress of his wrongs.  When that is the case, the emigrant will have to pack up and return to his native land.  Till that is the case, however, he may safely cross the water, and avail himself of the advantages offered him by the Dominion Government; but to do that he must have at least £200, and then he can stock his farm and keep himself till the return for his labours comes in.

‘The worst of all our books on emigration,’ said the editor of one of the dailies to me, ‘is that they give too glowing an estimate of the state of affairs.  They say a farmer will do well with £100.  This is not sufficient capital as a rule to start with.  It is true there have been instances where settlers have succeeded on this sum, but with such a sum as £200, Manitoba offers the farmer advantages such as no other place offers him.’  Here, also, the regular farm-hand is sure of his living.  I see an attempt is being made by a gentleman, now in Winnipeg, to plant out a couple of hundred boys—and I hear there is room for them.  But there is little building going on in Winnipeg, and the mechanic need not trouble himself to come here.  All in this part are loud in condemnation of emigration from the East-end of London.  Those poor of the East-end—alas! neither the Old World nor the New seems to know what to do with them.  Since this was written I see the Manitoba Mortgage and Investment Company have declared a dividend of eight per cent., an indication that at any rate in their part of the world money is being made.

CHAPTER VII.

LIFE ON THE PRAIRIE.

‘You will find Moose Jaw a very pretty place,’ said a gentleman to me as I left Winnipeg; and certainly it is a pretty place, though not exactly according to an Englishman’s idea of prettiness.

It consists of a railway-station and an assemblage of wooden huts and shops, which have all been called into existence within the last twelve months.  It boasts a weekly organ (such as it is), two or three places of worship, one or two billiard-rooms, and a post-office—not a tent, as in some parts of the country in which I have been, but a real wooden-house.  The shopkeepers seem to have nothing to do, and the pigs perambulate the streets, evidently enjoying the fine freedom allowed them in this part of the world.  There are at this time about 700 or 800 settlers, some of the farmers who came out last year having moved further west.

I am writing in the railway-station, in the waiting-rooms of which are many farmers, all on their way to Calgary—for which place, also, I am bound, expecting to start at the very inconvenient hour of two p.m.

The scene, as I sit, is not cheering.  Far as the eye can reach there is the prairie.  It was the same all the way from Winnipeg.  It will be the same all the way to Calgary, some 400 or 500 miles hence.  It is intensely hot, and men and women sit in the open air, under such shade as the wooden houses afford.  It is intensely cold in the winter.  Not a tree is to be seen, or a hill, or a farmhouse; nothing to relieve the monotony of the sea of grass land on every side, except here and there a prairie fire—the first step to be taken before the farmer commences the cultivation of the soil; and I must own a prairie fire by night is rather a pretty sight.

I parted last night with a General and his wife, who have come to settle about forty miles off.  At present he and his family have no fresh meat, and he has to make an arrangement with a Brandon butcher, about a hundred and fifty miles off, to supply him with a Sunday joint.  Tinned meats his family have tried, and he has got with him a fresh joint of meat, which he purchased in Winnipeg; but there are prairie chickens always to be had, and in some places, as we came along, we saw an abundance of wild ducks on the Assiniboine River, and in swamps, over which we rushed in the Pullman car.

This luxury cannot be expected in Moose Jaw.  Here there is no water at all.  Last year the farmers had no rain, and they fear they will have none now.  As it is, the prairie begins to look a little scorched.  I should be loth to spend the remainder of my days here; but a farmer may make a living, and so may a farm-labourer.  As to any other class of people here, there is no opening at all.  The town is full of shopkeepers, barristers, auctioneers, and dealers.  Mechanics who come out will starve.  When the land around is taken up they will have a chance, but not till then.

As I sit, a dark figure beckons me to come to him.  He has a Jim Crow hat, a blanket around his martial form, and a gayer one in front.  He has rings in his ears, bracelets on his arms, and a string of some kind of beads around his neck.  He offers me his hand, and I shake it.  Then I commence a conversation.  ‘What you called?’ I say.  He makes an unintelligible reply.  ‘You Smith, or Brown, or Jones, or Robinson?’ I ask; and again he gives an unintelligent grunt.  I offer him a cigar, and he sits down on his haunches in the shade.  He is one of the Black Bull men, who have been chased from the States, in consequence of having made that part of the world too hot for them.  They are not natives of this country, but have settled in the prairie two or three miles off.  I tell him to be a good boy, and I dare say he will obey my injunction as literally as any other man in England or anywhere else.

Again I look, and two red-coated warriors greet me.  They are on the look-out for contraband, and are as fine and clean and well-set fellows as any I have seen anywhere.  They belong to the mounted police, and live chiefly in the saddle, as there are but five hundred of them to all this gigantic North-West.  I had already made their acquaintance.  At the first station we came to after leaving Manitoba, one of them came into the car, gave a searching glance all round, and then walked out.  ‘What was that for?’ I asked the General.  ‘Oh! he has come to see if we have any whisky.  They are very particular.  I was coming this way once, when a fellow traveller took out his pocket flask and began drinking.  The mounted policeman who saw him do it immediately took his flask from him, and emptied it there and then.’  This strict prohibition is the result, not of the prevalence of Temperance sentiment in the North-West, but rather of fear of the Indians, who are better shots than the mounted police, although not so well provided with fire-arms.  The people seem to anticipate that the law will be relaxed when the whites are more numerous and the Indians fewer.  The law has had good results, nevertheless.  In obedience to it the German gives up his lager-beer.  And next to the Scotch the Germans make the best emigrants.

The General tells me such is the fineness of the climate that he finds he can get on very well without his customary glass of grog.  At Moose Jaw the inhabitants take to Hop Bitters instead, and one of the institutions of the place is the Hop Bitters Brewery.

I believe you may keep whisky if you get a permit, and a permit is not difficult, I understand, to get.

I am sorry to say the General, in spite of the mounted police, offered me a drop of whisky, and at a later period a friend, as we sat smoking, asked me if I was ready for a ‘smile.’  Of course, in my ignorance, I replied in the affirmative.  Diving under his seat, he brought out a fine bottle of real Scotch, and, mixing it with water, offered me a ‘smile.’  You may be sure I indignantly refused.  You cannot expect me to be a party to the violation of the law.

These Indians just now are creating a little apprehension, especially the tribe under the renowned Yellow Calf, who it was hoped had taken to farming, and who last year had a good crop, and bought a reaping machine; but the Indians are very restless, and Yellow Calf has sent a messenger to rouse the tribes, and a strong party of the mounted police are detached to watch his movements.  They are dying off the face of the earth, and we may well suppose that they bear no love to the white man, who has taken possession of the lands which they once knew to be their own.  Here the people evidently think that the sooner the Indians are exterminated the better.  The men do not work; all that is done by the squaws—wretched women with long black hair, and little black eyes as round as beads, and who rejoice in blankets quite as unromantic, but quite as comfortable, as those of their lords and masters.  Hitherto, I have not made way with the dusky beauties, but I may be more successful by-and-by.

I believe the Indians have a real grievance against the Canadian Government.  It was agreed that they should be settled in reserves, and that they should have a certain amount of food supplied.  This compact was fairly observed by the Canadian Government; but in an evil hour they made this part of their duty over to contractors, and we know what contractors are, all the world over.  The Indians say faith has not been kept with them, and it is to be feared that they have good reason for saying so.  Just now they are starving, as this is the close season, and they are not permitted to hunt or fish.  They say that there is no close season as far as the stomach is concerned, and from personal experience I may say I believe they are right.

It is now noon on the prairie, and I am dying of the heat.  Oh, for the forest shade!  Oh, for the crystal stream!  Alas! the water here is not good for the stranger, and I fear to touch it.  At Toronto I managed pretty well on Apollinaris water; but out here nothing of the kind is to be had.  What am I to do?  The beef here is so tough that you can’t cut it with a knife, and must have belonged to the oldest importation from my native land; and I have to pay a price for which I can have a luxurious repast in London.  O Spiers and Pond!  O Gordon and Co.!  O respected Ring and Brymer, under whose juicy joints and sparkling wines the ancient Corporation of London renews its youth!  How my soul longs for your flesh-pots in this dry and thirsty land, where no water is!  I have been out on the prairie under the burning sun.  It is cracked, and parched, and bare, and the flowers refuse to bloom, and only the gigantic grasshopper or the pretty but repulsive snake meets my eye.  That dim line, protracted to the horizon east and west, is the railroad.  That far-off collection of sheds is the rising town of Moose Jaw.  That blue line on the horizon, which makes me pant for the sea, is a mirage.  Far off are some white tents glistening in the sun.  They are the wigwams of the Indians.

Like the Wandering Jew, again I urge on my wild career, and here I am with noble savages—so hideous that words fail to tell their hideousness.  No wonder the squaws are bashful.  They have little to be proud of, though they have necklaces and rings and ornaments around their belts, and gay shawls, which have come from some far away factory.  Some of them have put a streak of red paint where the black hair divides.  Others are painted as much as any Dowager of Mayfair, and have ear ornaments that reach down to the middle.  Not one is fairly passable.

Rousseau and the sentimentalists, who talk of the savage, greatly err in their estimate of that noble individual.  He is lazy and filthy, gluttonous, and would be a wine-bibber had he the chance.  I looked into his tent, and there he was sitting naked, whilst his squaw was cooking a bit of a horse with the hair on for his dinner.  He is unpleasant as a neighbour for many reasons, and is indifferent how he gets a dollar, or how his squaw earns it either.  All along the prairie he seems to have nothing to do but to rush to the nearest railway station, and sit there all day in the hope that some passing traveller may give him tobacco or cash, the only two things on earth he seems to care for.  Apparently, the mothers are fond of their young.  The men are clever at stealing horses, and the traveller must look after his horses by night, or he may find them, as friends of my own did, gone in the morning.  But to return to the prairie, it is an awful place to travel in alone; it is so easy to lose one’s way.  I heard wonderful stories in this respect.  Fancy being lost on the prairie; nothing but the grass to eat; nothing but the sky to look at; nothing in the shape of human speech to listen to.  Out here by myself, I felt more than once how appropriate the language of the poet beloved by our grandmothers:

‘O Solitude, where are the charms
That sages have seen in thy face?
Better dwell in the midst of alarms,
Than reign in this horrible place.’

There is a good deal of hardship to be encountered by any who would penetrate to the dim and mysterious region we denominate the North-West.  For instance, I left Moose Jaw at half-past two yesterday morning by a train timed to arrive there at a quarter-past one; at which unreasonable hour I had to leave my bed, just as I was getting into a sound sleep, and to catch the train, which was so crowded that I could scarcely get a seat, and the atmosphere of which was not redolent of the odours of Araby the Blest.  There I had to sit till the time I mention, as the engine managed to get off the line.  Deeply do I pity the poor emigrants tempted into this part of the world by the delusive utterances of sham emigration agents at home and local journals—which, when they are not abusing one another, seem to delight in giving representations of the country by no means literally to be depended on; the only thing to do is to go to the fountain head—the Government office.  People who make up their minds to come into these parts must learn to put up with a good deal.  Here is a sad case, a very exceptional one, I admit, but I am bound to tell the whole truth.  I quote from a Winnipeg paper: ‘David Kirkpatrick, his wife, and nine children, the eldest a girl of twelve, arrived from Scotland on Wednesday.  A part of the voyage was made on board the Algoma.  The cold was intense, and many of the passengers suffered severely.  Among these was Mrs. Kirkpatrick.  The exposure, in her case, brought on a kind of low fever, and the poor woman died yesterday morning.  The husband’s case is deplorable.  With nine children on his hands, what is he to do?  He has a longing desire to get back to his friends in Scotland, but has not the means.  Will the public come to his rescue?  He and his helpless children are to be found in the immigrant sheds.’  I fear such cases are far from uncommon.  Imagine a poor woman leaving her native land, crossing the restless Atlantic, perhaps feeble with poor living, and worried with the care of nine helpless children, perhaps scarce recovered from sea-sickness, put on board an emigrant train, snatching hasty meals, or such accommodation as is provided at the expense of Dominion Government (I do not blame them or the railway authorities, they do all they can), travelling at uncertain hours, and arriving at her destination utterly overcome by fatigue.  What wonder is it that a poor woman now and then sacrifices her life in the attempt to build up a new home in this Promised Land?  No wonder that now and then death comes to such just as they reach Jordan and think that they are to reap the fruit of all their weary toil.

As I left Brandon on my way hither I saw by the side of one of the stations quite a little village of tents.  ‘What is that?’ said I to one of the mounted police.  ‘The emigrants,’ was his reply.  ‘They do say,’ said he slowly, ‘that there is some sickness amongst them.’  Whether the rumour was founded on fact I had no time to inquire, but certainly, when one thinks of the hardships of the emigrants’ lot, and the peculiar unfitness of many of them to stand hardships, I should not be surprised to learn that such was the case.  The further I come out, the less demand I find for emigrants.  It is only ploughmen who are wanted here.  The man who will succeed is the farmer with a small capital.  He has a splendid chance.  When the country is settled the mechanic may have his turn.

But remember, after all has been said and done, this is the Great Lone Land.  Emigration here is but a drop in the ocean as regards results.  I am now some 850 miles to the north-west of Winnipeg.  The country is an unbroken level, and, with the exception of Brandon and Moose Jaw, you see hardly a farmhouse, hardly any ploughed land, no sheep grazing on the downs, no herds fattening in the prairie; not a single tree to hide one from the snows of winter or the suns of summer.  By day you melt in the sun, by night you shiver with the cold.  When we came to a swamp now and then we saw a few wild ducks.  Once in the course of the weary ride we saw two or three deer.  All the rest was a parched plain, with here and there some lovely flowers, and with buffalo bones bleaching wherever you turn your eye.  In some parts the soil was strongly impregnated with alkali, so much so, indeed, that it made the ground white, and left a crust of what looked like ice on the lakes and ponds.  Can that huge region ever grow wheat and fatten flocks?  The experience of the experimental farms proves that it will.  All I know is that ages must elapse before Moose Jaw shall be a Manchester, or Brandon, in spite of its many advantages, the headquarters of the agricultural interest, with a corn market equalling that of Norwich or Ipswich.  Yet there are parts of Manitoba which contain undoubtedly as fine corn-growing country as any in the world.

This is especially true of the new tract of country opened up by the Canadian Pacific in the south-west.  As a rule, the further from the railway the land is, the better it is.  At the same time, it is to be remembered that a farmer who has no railway access is at a great disadvantage, and that in the winter it is no joke sending a man with a team of oxen and a waggon-load of produce twenty or thirty miles across the prairie, where a snowstorm, or ‘a blorrard’ at any time, may occur.

This is the great drawback of Manitoba: it has no trees.  In Ontario the farmer has his crops protected by a belt of trees from the inclemency of the weather.  But, then, in Manitoba the farmer has this advantage, that he has not to devote the greater part of his time and money to the cutting down of his trees.  He has only to plough the soil, and there is an abundant harvest.  If Manitoba lacks trees, it is expected to yield a plentiful supply of coal.  As I came along last night we saw a station supplied with gas.  It appears that in boring for water they discovered gas, which they now utilize to light the station and to work a steam engine.  This was not, however, in Manitoba, but in Alberta, just after we had left Medicine Hat, that pretty oasis in the desert, with the usual supply of hotels, billiard-rooms, and stores, and where I came into contact with the Cree Indians, a race even uglier than the Sioux Indian, whom I found at Moose Jaw.  They have higher cheekbones, and don’t plait their hair, and some of the old men reminded me not a little in outline of the late Lord Beaconsfield, whom the Canadians consider Sir John Macdonald strongly resembles.

It is curious to note how the buffalo has vanished from the region which was formerly his happy hunting-ground.  He has now forsaken the country; you see only his bones and his track.  Some people say that the railway has done it, and others that the destruction is the work of the Americans, who say, ‘Kill the buffalo and you get rid of the Indians.’  These latter are to be met with everywhere, clad in flannel garments radiant with all the hues of the rainbow.  Chiefly they affect blankets—red, blue, or green.  At Calgary I came across more of them—this time of the Blackfoot tribe.  There is very little difference in any of them.  In one thing they all resemble each other, that is, they don’t seem to care much about work.  As English does not happen to be one of their accomplishments, my intercourse with them has been of a somewhat limited character.

For the sake of intending emigrants let me dispel a couple of popular errors.  One that the heat is most enjoyable; another, that it is a cheap country to come to.  Neither assertion is exactly the truth.  As I write the heat is insufferable, and yet this is early spring.  I saw snow yesterday in a hollow of the hills not yet melted, and last night, sleeping in a stuffy Pullman car full of people, I was awoke with the cold.  The other fallacy which I would expose is that this is a cheap country.  On the contrary, it is nothing of the kind.  Paxton Hood, if I remember aright, once gave a lecture on America under the title of the ‘Land of the Big Dollar.’  If I were to lecture on Canada I should call it the ‘Land of the Little Dollar.’  A dollar here is of no account.  This morning I went into a shop and had a bottle of ginger-beer, and the cost was one shilling; and this, too, after I had been administering a little ‘soft sawder’ to the fair American damsel who waited on me (she was from Michigan, and was remarkably wide awake), in the mistaken hope that she would be a little reasonable in her charge.  Everyone smokes cigars all day long, and yet Canadian cigars are as costly as they are atrocious.  Fortunately one can’t spend money in drink, as that is prohibited, and the chemists at Calgary have recently got into a scrape for supplying customers with essence of lemon, by means of which they manage to fuddle themselves.  The price of fruit is prohibitory; cucumbers, such as you in London would give three halfpence for, are here at Calgary as much as a shilling.  Eggs are four shillings a dozen; meat and bacon and ham are as dear as in England, and not a quarter so good.  I am appalled as I see how the money goes; I fear to be stranded at the foot of the Rockies.  If I get back to the west I shall have to work my passage back to England as fireman or stoker, or in some such ignoble capacity.  If I was younger I would turn gardener.  I believe anyone who would come out here with sufficient capital to plant a nursery ground or to stock a good fruit garden would make a lot of money, as the farmers, of course, do not think of such things, and the supply is quite unequal to the demand.  In Calgary they did not have three inches of frost all last winter.  It is true they have even now a sharp nip of frost; but I hear of peas flourishing at a farmer’s close by, and the region abounds with wild strawberries and raspberries and cherries.  If they grow wild, surely they will equally prosper under more careful culture.

A Special Committee of the Dominion House of Commons which was appointed last session to obtain evidence upon the agricultural industries of the country, examined several witnesses as to the suitability of Canada, and especially of the Canadian North-West, for the growth of forest and fruit trees.  The testimony given showed that there are many varieties of fruit which thrive in Great Britain, Germany, Russia, and other European countries, which would, if transplanted, be equally suited to the climate of the North-West, it being stated that excellent fruit is grown in great quantities in Europe at points where the temperature ranges considerably lower than it does in Canada.  It is urged that the example of the Russian and German Governments should be followed in the establishment of plantations of fruit trees and experimental farms in different parts of the Dominion, to test the kind of trees and fruits best suited to the different localities.

Since my return the following paper has been put into my hands:—‘The following is a reliable estimate of this season’s wheat crop in Manitoba and the North-West Territories:—Estimated wheat acreage in Manitoba, 350,000; yield at 23 bushels per acre, 8,000,000; estimated wheat acreage in North-West Territories, 65,000; yield at 23 bushels per acre, or 1,500,000 bushels—a total of 415,000 acres and 9,500,000 bushels.  Deducting 2,760,000 bushels for home consumption and seed, a surplus remains of 6,740,000 bushels.  Everything now points to a larger yield per acre than that of 1883.

‘Operations have been carried on very extensively this season at the Bell Farm, in the Canadian North-West, which is said to be the largest farm in the world.  Though this is but the second year of cultivation, there are already 8,000 acres under crop, 5,000 to 6,000 of which are under wheat, and a portion of the remainder under flax.  Last year 10,000 bushels were exported from the farm, and the excellence of the grain secured for it a good price in the market.  The crop of this year is estimated to be 40 per cent. better.  Experts from Montana who have recently visited this section of the Canadian North-West, state that they never saw any grain in the United States to equal that on and around the Bell Farm.’

CHAPTER VIII.

AMONGST THE COW-BOYS.

I am writing from Calgary, a little but growing collection of huts and wooden houses planted on a lovely plain with hills all around, a river at my feet, on the banks of which some poplars flourish, and I can almost fancy I am in Derbyshire itself.  It is a gay place, this rising town, at the foot, as it were, of the Rockies, and just now is unusually gay, as the Queen’s birthday is being celebrated with athletic sports and a ball; and, besides, a new clergyman has made his appearance, the Rev. Parks Smith, from a Bermondsey parish, who is to preach in the new Assembly Hall, which is to be set apart as a church on Sundays.  I am going to hear him, and already I feel somewhat of a Pharisee—I have on a clean collar, which I religiously preserved for the occasion, and have had my boots blackened.  The sight is so novel that I have spent half an hour on the prairie contemplating the effect of that operation.  Already I feel six inches higher.

I can’t say that I think quite so much of Calgary as do the people who live in it.  In splendour, in wealth, in dignity, and importance, they evidently anticipate it will be a second Babylon.  Well, a good deal has to be done first.  The situation is pleasant, I admit.  You incline to think well of Calgary after the dreary ride across the prairie, and you have quite a choice of hotels, and of shops, all well stocked; but then these shops are little better than huts, and the hotels certainly don’t throw the shops into the shade.

For instance, I am in the leading hotel.  It is too far from the railway, but that is because the C.P.R. have moved their station a little further on, where the new town of Calgary is springing up.  We have an open room, where I am writing—a dark dining-room on one side, and then, on the other, a little row of closets, which they dignify by the name of bedrooms.  I am the proud possessor of one.  It holds a bed, whereon, I own, I slept soundly; a row of pegs, on which to hang one’s clothes; and a little shelf, on which is placed a tiny wash-hand basin; while above that is a glass, in which it is impossible to get a good view of yourself—a matter of very small consequence, as the glass certainly reflects very poorly the looker’s personal charms, whatever they may be.  I ought to have said there is a window; and as my bedroom is on the ground floor (upper rooms are rare in these wooden houses in the North-West), I am much exercised in my mind as to whether that window may not be opened in the course of the night, and the roll of dollars I have hidden under my pillow carried off.  Then, just as I am getting into bed, I discover somebody else’s boots.  That is awkward—very.  It is with a sigh of relief I discover that they are not feminine.  Suppose the owner of those boots comes into my bedroom and claims to be the rightful owner?  Suppose he resorts to physical force?  Suppose, in such a case, I got the worst of it?

Fortunately, before I can answer these questions satisfactorily to myself, I am asleep, and yet they are not so irrelevant as you fancy.

Last night, for instance, as I was sitting in the cool air, smoking one of the peculiarly bad cigars in which the brave men of Canada greatly rejoice, and for which they pay as heavily as if they were of the finest brands, a half-drunken man came up, abusing me in every possible way, threatening to smash every bone in my body, and altogether behaving himself in a way the reverse of polite.  Perhaps you say, Why did you not knock him down?  In novels heroes always do, and come clear off; but I am not writing fiction, and in real life I have always found discretion to be the better part of valour.  The fact is, the fellow was a strapping Hercules, and I could see in a moment, if the appeal were to force, what the issue might be.  Yet I had not done anything intentionally to offend him.  He had come galloping up to the hotel, as they all do here—the horses are not trained to trot—and his horse had bucked him off.  I believe I did say something to a friend of a mildly critical nature, but I question whether the rider heard it.  The fact was, he was angry at having been thrown, and seeing that I was a stranger, he evidently thought he could pour the vials of his wrath on me.  I must admit that in a little while he came up and apologized, and there was an end of the matter.  But the worst part of it was that his friend remarked to me that this drunken insulting ruffian was one of the best fellows in the place.  If so, Calgary has to be thankful for very small mercies indeed.

You ask, How could the fellow be drunk, seeing that there is a prohibitory liquor-law in existence?  I have every reason to believe that Calgary is a very drunken place, nevertheless.  I have already referred to one case of drunkenness.  I may add that, in the afternoon of the same day, I had seen another in the shape of an old gentleman who was going to head a revolt which would cut off the North-West from the Dominion, and which would make her a Crown colony.  He was very drunk as he stood on the bar opposite me declaiming all this bunkum.  I remarked his state to the landlord, who seemed to feel how unfair it was that men could get drunk on the sly, and that a decent landlord, like himself, should be deprived of the privilege of selling them decent liquor.  I own it is very hard on the publicans.  At Moose Jaw one of them told me he would give five hundred pounds for a liquor license.  ‘They call this a free country,’ said an indignant English settler to me, ‘and yet I can’t get a drop of good liquor.  Pretty freedom, ain’t it?’  Unfortunately, the Government, while it prohibits the sale of liquor, does not exterminate the desire for it—perhaps only increases it—as we always cry for what we can’t get.  Unfortunately, also, it is true that, as long as this demand exists, the supply will be found somehow.

In Montana there are a lot of blackguards and daredevils who will run the thing in somehow.  Liquor is also brought in by the railway as coal-oil, oatmeal, flour, varnish, and then it is doctored up and sold at £1 the bottle to the thirsty souls.  Now, what is the consequence?  Why, that, as a local journal remarks, liquor is sold; the dealers are pests and outlaws; they sell their poison for ten times the price of what people who don’t belong to the Blue Ribbon Army call good liquor, and then vanish with their ill-gotten money out of the country, excepting such as they may leave behind them in the shape of fines, when found out.  I do think the hotel-keeper has much reason to complain of prohibition.  It presses hardly on him, and does not put drunkenness down.  I mentioned these facts to a Baptist minister from England, whom I met in Toronto.  He would not believe them; I gave him cuttings from newspapers to support my view.  His reply was that they were hoaxes.  I have now been in Calgary a day, and already I find that these hoaxes, as my friend calls them, are veritable facts.

I believe that many of my travelling companions were a little fresh last night, from their soberness and dejection of manner this morning.  They were away down town, and had not returned when I retired to rest; and this morning several of the householders complain of having had their doors knocked at at most unseasonable hours.

At meals I meet queer company.  We have a Chinese cook.  I have a faint idea that he has murderous designs on us all, his smile is so childlike and bland; yet I prefer his placid pleasant round face to those of his female helps, sour and ill-looking, who earn wages such as an English servant-girl never dreams of.  His messes seem to be appreciated, and little is left after meal-time.  It is enough for me to see the men eat.  Every particle of food is conveyed into the mouth by means of the knife, which is also freely used if sugar or salt be required.  Our dining-room is simply a shed, and a very dark one, having a canvas on one side and unpainted deal on the other.  Few houses at Calgary are painted, though a painted house looks so much prettier than a deal one that I wonder painting is not more resorted to, especially when you remember how paint preserves the wood.  Many of the houses here are brought all the way from Ontario, and, perhaps, this accounts for their smallness.  They chiefly consist of two rooms, one a shop, the other a sitting and night-room; and the larger number have been erected within the last few months.  What we call in England a gentleman’s house, I should say does not exist in the whole district.  A gentleman would find existence intolerable here, though the air is fine, and the extent of the prairie is unbounded.  There are two newspapers in the town, and the professions are all well represented.

As to my companions, the less I say of them the better.  They are young and vigorous, and use language not generally tolerated in polite society.  Their talk is chiefly of horses and bets.  They ride recklessly up and down the dusty path which forms the main street, and would not break their hearts if they knocked a fellow down; or they drive light waggons on four wheels, creating the most overwhelming clouds of dust as they rush by.  As to their saddles, they are as unlike English ones as can well be imagined, rising at each end, so as to give the rider a very safe seat, while their stirrups are as long almost as the foot itself; but the saddles have this advantage, that they never give the horses sore backs.  As to the horses, they are all branded, and turned loose on to the prairie when not required.  Most of the men are prospectors—people who go round the country in search of mines; or cow-boys—that is, men employed in the cattle ranches in the district.  The cowboy is a fearful sight.  His hands and face are as brown as leather, he wears a straw hat—or one of felt—with a very wide brim.  His coat or jacket is, perhaps, decorated with Indian work.  Around his waist he wears a belt, which he makes useful in many ways.  Then he has brown leather leggings, ornamented down the sides with leather fringes, and on his heels he puts a tremendous pair of spurs.  The men on the mountains have much the same style of dress, and are fine specimens of muscular, rather than intellectual or moral, development.  On the whole, I am not unduly enamoured of these pioneers of civilization; but, then, I was born in the old country, and learned Dr. Watts’s hymns, and was taught to—

‘Thank the goodness and the grace
That on my birth has smiled,
And made me in these Christian days
A happy English child.’

I see a good deal more of Calgary than I wish to.  I feel that I have been made a fool of by the station-master.  I am, as you may be aware, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains.  They are some 60 miles off, yet; already I have seen their far-off peaks, glistening with snow, rising into the summer sky.  As I have got so far, I must see them.  There are trees up there, and the sight of a tree would be good for sore eyes; there are cooling shades out there, and here, though it is but early morning, it is too hot to stir.  The scenery out there is the finest to be seen in all the Canadian continent, and I would carry away with me, to think of in after years, something of their beauty.  I travelled all this way for that purpose, and hoped to have been off before, and now find I must wait, owing to a blunder on the part of the station-master.  He promised he would let me know if he sent a freight-train to the Rocky Mountains.  Well, he sent off a train at one o’clock this morning, and never let me know anything about it, and the consequence is I must stay two more days in this dreary spot, without conveniences such as I could find in the meanest cottage in England, and at a cost which would enable me to live in luxury and fare sumptuously at home.  One lesson I have learned, which I repeat for the benefit of my readers.  Never depend upon other people; hear all they say, and then act for yourself.  Had I done so, I should have been now in the Rocky Mountains.  I trusted in others, and I am, in consequence, the victim of misplaced confidence.

I gather a few items of interest to intending emigrants.  Crops raised in the vicinity of Calgary during 1883 gave the following yields per acre:—Wheat, 33 bushels; barley, 40 bushels; oats, 60 bushels.  The Government farm a few miles off, which I have visited, does well.  The country round offers especial advantages to sheep and dairy farmers, cheese manufacturers, and hog raisers.  My own impression is, and I have mentioned it to several persons who all think it excellent, that any man would easily make his fortune who set up a poultry farm.  Eggs and fowls are almost entirely unknown, and if the producer did not find a market here, he could easily send his produce by the railway to where it was wanted.  Eggs and fowls help one as well as anything to keep body and soul together.

I am glad I went to church yesterday.  My presence there gave quite a tone to the place (said the head man to me this morning), and so far I may presume I did good service.  The congregation consisted chiefly of men, and the collection amounted to nearly 16 dollars—pretty good, considering (said the above mentioned gentleman) there are two or three schism shops in the place.  In the evening I went to the Wesleyan Methodist schism shop, as he called it, and heard a sermon, which touched me more than any sermon I have heard a long time.  As I came out the effect was startling.  The sun was sinking in crimson glory just behind the green hills by which Calgary is surrounded.  Far off a dim splendour of pink testified to the existence of a prairie fire, while before me stood a gigantic Indian, with his big black head rising out of a pyramid of gorgeous robes, really dazzling to behold.  There is an Indian Mission near here, but the Indians are not the only heathens out here.

I have just had a ride in a buck-cart, which is the kind of vehicle the colonists use.  It is of boards on four wheels, on which is placed a seat for a couple of persons, while the luggage is piled up behind.  Some of them have springs, as fortunately was the case with the one on which I rode, or I should have had a very uncomfortable ride indeed.  Perhaps I ought not to be so angry with the station-master as I was when I interviewed him this morning.  I have just seen a man who got on to the freight train, but he tells me it was so uncomfortable that he preferred to wait, and got off after he had taken his passage.

Money seems scarce.  I have just been to the post-office to send a letter to England.  The postmaster could give me no change, and I had to take post-cards instead.  I suppose all the money goes to the smugglers.  In this small town 500 dollars are sent weekly to Winnipeg for liquor; so much for prohibition in Calgary.

As there is no bank here, people find it hard to get money.  A young man waiting here to make up a mining party for the Rockies, tells me he had to telegraph to Toronto for 500 dollars, which were sent in the shape of a post-office order.  The postmaster charged him five dollars for cashing the order.  I have just heard of a loan of 300 dollars effected; the borrower has agreed to pay, in the shape of interest, the moderate sum of four dollars a month.

Calgary, according to some, can have no enduring prosperity; if so, the land-grabbers who have scattered themselves all over it will be deeply disappointed.

Edmonton, where they get gold out of the river sand, and where they have already a kind of dredging machine employed for that purpose, it is said, will shortly have a railway to itself, and the men from the mountains, who are the mainstay of Calgary, will go that way.

I fancy I hear some one exclaim: On those wide plains over which sweeps the ice-laden air of the Rockies, what pleasant walks you must have!  My dear sir, you are quite mistaken.  Perhaps, as you set out, there comes a herd of wild horses—and then I remember how poor George Moore was knocked down by one, and avoid the boundless prairie accordingly.

Then there are the dogs, ‘their name is Legion,’ and they are big, and as wild as they are big, and I am not partial to hydrophobia.  No; it is better to sit at the door of my tent and watch the flight of the horses, the fights of the dogs, and the stream of dust a mile long which denotes that some Jehu is at hand, who will pull up at the door, deeply drink water, smoke a cigar, use a little strong language, and then mount again and ride off into boundless space.

Here and there a pedestrian may be seen making his way to his solitary hut or shop, where at no time do you see any sign of life; and how the people here make a living (with the exception of the hotel-keepers, who are always busy) puzzles me.  I meet good fellows, I own.  They are friendly in their way.  As humour is a thing unknown in Canada and the North-West, they generally grin when I make a remark, which I do at very protracted intervals, fearing to be worn out before the long day is done.  Nevertheless, I begin to doubt whether I am not relapsing into the wild life of those around me.  Fortunately, I have not yet acquired the habit of speaking through my nose, nor do I make that fearful sound—a hawking in the throat—which is a signal that your neighbour is preparing to expectorate, and which renders travelling, even in a first-class car, almost insupportable; but my hands are tanned.  I sit with my waistcoat open, and occasionally in my shirt-sleeves.  I care little to make any effort to be polite; I am clean forgetting all my manners, and feel that in a little while I shall be as rough as a cow-boy, or as the wild wolf of the prairie.  It is clear I must not tarry at Calgary too long.

CHAPTER IX.

IN THE ROCKIES—HOLT CITY—LIFE IN THE CAMP—A ROUGH RIDE—THE KICKING HORSE LAKE—BRITISH COLUMBIA.

I am writing from Holt City—so named after a famous contractor out here—in the middle of the Rocky Mountains.  Here the rail comes, but no further, as yet, though some 2,000 men are at work a few miles ahead, and making incredible speed in the construction of this gigantic intercolonial undertaking—an undertaking which would have been completed by this time had the late Sir Hugh Allan (the founder of the Allan line of steamers) and Sir John Macdonald had their way.

I left Calgary without shedding a tear—the train was only three hours late—after remarking to the manager of the leading hotel that, much as I had enjoyed myself under his humble but hospitable roof, I would give him leave to charge me twenty dollars a day if ever he caught me within his doors again.

When the train arrived, of course there was no room.  This is the working season, and the C.P.R., as everyone calls it in Canada, is hurrying on men to the front as fast as they can be got.

However, I was permitted to get inside the mail van, in company with a contractor, his wife, and a baby, which behaved itself as well as could be expected under the circumstances; a lady who was going to visit her husband, one of the contractors on the line; and an invalid from Pennsylvania, who did not seem much to enjoy that rough mode of travelling.  We reached Holt City about eleven, when it was quite dark, and the only bed I could find was a shelf in the van, on which I was glad to lie down—but not, alas! to sleep.  Had I got out, I should have been lost, or run over by an engine—that is positive, as there is no road, only divers rails, as, for instance, the Continental Hotel at Newhaven.  I am now writing in the post-office, which seems the great social centre of the place, though the mail only leaves twice a week.  It is a decent-sized tent, with a desk and counter in the middle for the sale of stamps and cigars and the delivery of letters.  Behind it are a couple of beds on which men are reposing in a way that I envy, and covered with buffalo skins—the possession of which I envy them still more.  In front is a table, fitted up with old papers and a couple of uncommonly uncomfortable benches, whereon are sitting various loafers, smoking and talking, and warming themselves as best they can at the big stove—one of which you now see in every Canadian house, and which but feebly keeps out the raw cold of the morning.

Holt City is admirably located, to use an American phrase which I heartily detest.  It is a clearance in the forest, bordered by the Bow River, which dashes foaming along.  There is a shed, which does duty for a railway station; a collection of tents, in which the employés of the company dwell, or which hold the large stores it collects here; a large shed for meals, a railway car, in which Mr. John Ross, the able administrator of the C.P.R. in these parts, resides with his accomplished wife; and further off are other tents, which do duty as hotels, billiard-rooms, and shops.  Up here, I see little to remind me of the Old Country, except bottles of Stephens’ inks, of Aldersgate Street, London, which, says the head accountant, are the only inks on which they can rely.

We are in a valley—a valley high up among the mountains—as fair as that in which Rasselas studied to be a virtuous prince, but of a character common in the length and breadth of the Rockies.  I have seen scores of valleys as fair; and yet I own the exquisite loveliness of the spot—at any rate, in summer time—is marvellous.  Around me rise Alps on Alps, up into the cloudless blue.  Firs, all larch and pine, in all the freshness of their new-found greenery, clothe their base; while the snow, in wreaths like marble, glistens on their dark sides or crowns their rugged peaks.  It would seem as if there could be no world beyond.  It is really wonderful what pleasant nooks of this kind one sees everywhere.  I stopped at one such last night, a station called Canmore, which, however, seemed to be the fairest of them all—and so the fish think, as the station-master tells me he often catches speckled trout seven or eight pounds in weight.  Very near are valuable sulphur and other springs, and when the railway shall be completed, I look forward to the time when Pullman cars shall come here laden with health seekers from all parts of the world, who are fond of fishing and fine air.

I had a narrow escape from not coming here at all.  When we stopped at Canmore for our evening meal, I found I was utterly unable to climb back into the mail van.  I may be young in heart, but, alas!  I have lost somewhat of the agility of early youth.  I mentioned this to the station-master and guard, who both promised me repeatedly that they would have the train drawn up for me.  Knowing this, I listened unconcernedly to the cry of ‘All on board!’  Judge, then, of my horror when I saw the train gradually gliding past.

‘Jump into the last car,’ cried the guard, as he saw me looking daggers at him.

Fortunately I succeeded in doing so: it is easier to get on to an American car when in motion than on an English one, on account of its peculiar construction.  This is fortunate, as the railway passenger in Canada has to trust entirely to himself.  He is ignored by guards and porters and station-master altogether.  Unfortunately, I jumped on to the car sacred to the person of Sir John McNeil, and I was requested by the black cook to move off, which I declined doing till we reached the next station, when I moved into another car, and created not a little laughter as I told my story.  It is to be trusted that Sir John enjoyed himself all the more for having got rid of my vulgar presence.  I hope Sir John may enlighten his friends on his return; but I fear he will gain little knowledge of the people or the country, travelling in such a way.  Perhaps he will learn as much about it as the Marquis of Lorne, or the Earl of Carnarvon, who recommends the poor people of the East-end to come to Canada, where the chances are they will be worse off than they are at home.  Canada requires hardy, muscular men—if with money in their pockets so much the better—not the refuse of our towns.

Again, I repeat, people in England ought to have fuller information about Canada ere they go thither.  It is a fortune for the strong man, but even he has to run risks.  Everywhere I hear of what is called mountain fever, or Red River fever, or fever with some other name which stands for typhoid disease.  Grand and beautiful as is the country, fertile as is the soil, people forget to observe sanitary laws at times and suffer in consequence.  But I must own that all the men I met in Holt City were pictures of health and strength.  For one thing, the company feeds them well.  I have just breakfasted in camp with the men.  We had good coffee and fried ham and other good things for breakfast, and good tins of preserved fruits, to which everyone did justice.  Everyone here has to rough it.  I washed this morning in the open air, having myself ladled into a tin basin the water out of a cask in which still floated the broken ice.

Holt City is, I suppose, the head-quarters of the C.P.R.  Yet it is a place by itself.  Nothing can be rougher than the rail from here to Calgary, or finer than the view.  It is an advantage that the trains are so slow, as you have more time to enjoy the scenery, which has almost shaken my attachment to the Hebrides, though one misses the purple heather which lends such a charm to the grey hills of the North.  But comparisons are odious, and the Rockies, in all their charms, must be seen to be appreciated.  It was a wonderful view I had last night as I sat on the steps of the last car, drinking in all the strange beauties of the place.  We were climbing hour by hour a wilderness of mountains.  We were hemmed in by them from afternoon till night came down upon the face of the earth.  Mostly they were black, with snowy variations; some were bare, others clothed with verdure.  Some raised their heads in the clear blue sky as fortresses, others were peaks, others ragged and uneven, shapeless masses of matter growing out of one another.  Some seemed to like good company, others stood solitary and apart.

In the dells and shadows there are tales yet to be told.  For instance, here are some remains of the ancient road to British Columbia.  Here, a man tells me, last year there was a terrible tragedy.  An English gentleman and his son were camping near the spot.  There came a forest fire.  Awful to relate, when the son had time to look around him, his father was burnt to death.  Fearful are some of the solitudes through which the passenger plunges.  The bear and the eagle have them entirely to themselves.  Few have explored them; fewer still have scaled the mountain heights by which they are girdled.  But nowadays one is in search of silver or gold or coal, and has no time to think of mountain grandeur.  Cities rise and fall very quickly here.  Silver City, for instance, where we stopped last night, was all the rage a year or two ago.  It is now deserted.  Yet people say silver is still to be found there, and at Calgary, as an illustration of the fact, a ‘prospector’ showed me a fine specimen of silver, at the same time asking me to come and see the shaft.  I replied I was as fond of silver as he was, but I sought it in another way.

But to return to the Rockies.  I wonder not that in times past the Indians saw in them the home of the gods, or that there the scientist discovers in them the source of the whirlwind or the storm.

I am again train-bound.  No one knows when we may have a train from the east, and till we have one it is impossible for me to get away.  Physically, perhaps, this is a good thing for me, as it enables me to recuperate.  Here I am, 5,000 or 6,000 feet above the level of the sea, breathing mountain air, and luxuriating in mountain scenery.  Last night I slept in a caboose, and it was the best night’s rest I have had for a long time.  I went to bed at nine and was up again at five.  Do my readers know what a caboose is?  It is a railway luggage-car on wheels.  Mine is rather a superior one, and has an upper and a lower chamber, and has in the upper chamber a row of shelves, which do service as beds.  I had one of these to myself, and, as I was well provided with blankets, did not much grieve at the absence of linen sheets.

My dear old friend, Mrs. Moodie, wrote a capital book, called ‘Roughing It in the Bush.’  Assuredly I may, one of these days, write one on roughing it in the Rockies, though the keeper of the caboose, out of respect for my age and infirmities, does all he can to make me comfortable.  Already I feel the better for the air.  For the first time since I have been in Canada I have felt hungry; for the first time, also, since I have been in Canada I have not had to physic myself with chlorodyne.  A month up here in the Rockies would make a young man of me or of anyone else.  I must be off before I become as gay as a horse fed on beans.  This is, I take it, the real and sufficient reason of the peculiar spirits of the mountaineers, who rather alarmed me with their liveliness at Calgary.  Their exuberance is due to air, and air alone.  As I sit, a long row of mules files past; a man is riding at the head, the others follow with their burdens packed on their backs.  He is a ‘prospector,’ and is on his way to the other side.  Already as many as a thousand such have gone the same road this summer.

The mountains are full of wealth—in the shape of gold or silver, or coal or slate, or other precious commodities.  Hitherto the cost of conveyance has kept people away.  The opening of the C.P.R. will remove that inconvenience.  They will have a chance now of getting rid of their minerals, when discovered, and of fetching up their stores from the East at less expense.  As it is, things are dear enough in Holt City.  For instance, if I send or receive a letter, I have to pay the postmaster a few cents in addition to the usual postage-stamp.  Calgary I thought bad enough, but up here prices may be quoted as much higher.  Yesterday I had a ride over the mountains.  It will be long before I take such a ride again.  No English coachman would drive such a road for five hundred a year.  No English carriage could stand it, nor English horses either.  I expected the buggy, as it was called, to be shattered into atoms every minute—it looked so light and frail, and the horses—a handsome pair, the property of Mr. Ross—to be ruined for life; yet we got safely to the front—where the men are hard at work cutting down trees, removing earth, tunnelling, and pushing on the work with all their might; and there, I must say, there are openings for any number of men who like to come out.  Last year little was done in the winter, because the contractors believed the climate would be against them.  No one before then had wintered in the Rockies, and everyone believed the climate to be much worse than it really is.

But to return to the ride.  I yet feel it in every bone in my body, as all the time I had to hold on to my seat like grim death.  Sometimes the coachman was high above me; sometimes I was at the top and he at the bottom; now we were deep in the mud, the next moment high and dry on a formidable boulder, bigger than a hogshead, and came down with a bang, which sent me quivering all over.  Here we were with the water up to the floor; and then we came on a mudbank quite as deep.  Not an inch of the ground was level.  It was all collar work or the reverse.  Fortunately we were shaded by the firs which climb all the mountains out here, or the heat would have been unbearable.  As to conversation, that was quite out of the question, though the ‘boy’ who drove me came when a child from Devonshire, and had a strong wish to see the old country again, of whose lanes, yellow with primroses, and cottages bright with roses and honeysuckles, and farmhouses green with ivy, he had a very vivid recollection.  He made a lot of money, he said.  Indeed, he had more than he knew what to do with.  Last winter, for instance, he stopped a month in Winnipeg, and spent there four hundred dollars.  ‘How did it all go?’  ‘Oh! in treating the boys!’ was his answer.  I rather intimated that was a poor way of using his money.  ‘Oh!’ said he, ‘they all do it.  That is the way of the boys in this country!’  I was glad to hear him say that he thought of taking a farm soon, and was putting by the money for that purpose.  The Rocky Mountains cannot be a bad place for a ‘boy.’  One of them yesterday told me how he had vainly written to his father to come out, who was now in the old country breaking stones on the road.  Here, at any rate, he would have been better off.  It is a long journey, I know, for the British emigrant.  We are more than 1,000 miles from Winnipeg, and the ride is a dreary one till you reach the Rockies.  The run to Winnipeg from Toronto by Port Arthur and Owen Sound is a real enjoyment.  It took us two days and two nights to reach Port Arthur from Toronto, and the trip from Port Arthur to Winnipeg is accomplished easily in twenty hours.

‘Any bears about here?’ said I to the ‘boy,’ in one of the few minutes allowed for conversation in the course of our rough ride yesterday.

‘Not many.  I seed one near where we are passing.  He was a black bear, and stood up and looked at me, and then I looked at him.  I wished I’d had a gun, and then I would have shot him.’

Fortunately I saw no bear, black or brown, in the woods as we drove amongst them; scarcely a bird—only one, an owl I think, on the top of a tree, which never moved, though we were close upon it.  ‘Do you make any difference in work on Sunday?’ I asked of one of the men.  ‘Oh no; Sunday ain’t of much account here.’  This is to be regretted, if only for physical considerations.  Everyone can work all the better for a day of rest.  Again, I think the C.P.R. injures itself in this way, that it may lose the services of useful men who like to keep the Sabbath, either from physical or religious considerations.  As a matter of fact, I found many did take a rest on Sunday, and it was amusing to see how the morning was devoted to haircutting and shaving and mending clothes in the open air.  A man, I know, can spend his Sunday at honest work better than in drinking.  But when we think of the wild life of the miners and navvies in the ends of the earth—a life so wild that the C.P.R. has got a law passed to forbid the sale of intoxicating drink, and people are appalled when they read, in spite of the law, whisky is supplied to men who have a large number of revolvers at their side—it seems that a little provision might be made for the religious wants of the community.  The philosopher will laugh, I admit.  My reply is: Men were lifted out of degradation by the Christian religion in some form or other, and as we root that out we may expect society to retrograde.  These men to the front will pay for looking after.  They are fine fellows mostly.  At any rate, they are the pioneers of modern civilization, and should be reverenced as such.  They are to be honoured for their work’s sake.  They plant, we gather the fruit.  They sow the seed, we reap the harvest, and their work remains a monument of perseverance, of the benefits of the Union, of enterprise, and capital and skill.  That Canada has thus carried the railway and the telegraph across the Rockies shows that England and America will have to look to their industrial laurels.

I am alive, I am thankful to say; but it seems to me that I should have left my bones on the Kicking Horse Lake, which lies on the slope of the Rockies, situated in British Columbia, where the scenery becomes grander and the air balmier as it comes up laden with the soft breeze of the Pacific.  You see that at once in the superior size of the trees which clothe the sides of that part of the Rockies.

As far as what the navvies call the front, I had the benefit of the temporary railway by which Mr. Ross sends his labourers.  It is then the great difficulties of the work commence, as the rocks are tremendous, and one of the tunnels making will be three-quarters of a mile long.

This hot weather I can scarce imagine how the men and horses stand the work; of the former, some were digging, others cutting down the trees, others removing rocks, others filling up the swamps.  Here the waggons were being laden with stores to be sent further to the front; now and then a long trail of mules sweeps by with miners and miners’ stores, and I plunge into the forest, shaded from the fierce sun by the tall firs, and as I struggle in the swamps caused by the melting snows, I can realize something of the hardships of the early travellers—hardships of which the tourist, when the rail is completed, will have no idea, though he will be a little alarmed as the mountains drop away beneath his feet for more than a hundred miles to the Columbia river, while the narrow track of rails winds along its sides.  In the winter this pass, when covered with snow, is very dangerous, and many are the mules and horses dashed to pieces over the precipice.

The lake, when I reach it, is full of ice and snow, and all round the mountains rear their snow-capped heads.  One of the peculiarities of this region is the abundance of water in some shape or other, and the shadows on the lakes reflect as a mirror all the surrounding scene—the dark forest at the base, the masses of slate-like rock above, the snow in all its radiant white higher up, the unclouded azure that crowns and glorifies all.

Heated and tired, I throw myself on the moss, and realize, in all its intensity, the appalling loneliness of forest life—I startle three wild ducks, that is all.  Down on my left comes the rushing torrent in a series of picturesque waterfalls into the lake.  I climb the mountain by the side of them.  The water sends to me an ice-laden air, which revives me as I struggle upwards and onwards, watching the whirlpools and cascades as the water angrily struggles to force its way through the iron barriers by which it is hemmed in.  I secure a fine specimen of petrified moss from a stream close by.  But I may not linger.  Already I feel weak as I plunge into the frozen snow, or sink where the sun has melted it into morass, or stumble over an old moss-grown trunk, or climb the big trunks which the axeman has already levelled, or pass the streams which intersect the plain on logs off which I expect to slip every moment.  Then I come to the railway men, and avail myself of the imperfect and unconnected track which they have formed; but now the sun beats fiercely on me, and I can scarcely put one foot before another.  The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.  Fortunately, I reach the tent of a good Samaritan.  I refresh myself with water from the crystal stream.  I lunch on bread and cheese, with tea kindly fetched from the company’s hut, but I have to lie down three hours before I feel myself equal to urging on my wild career again.

British Columbia seems at present to be chiefly occupied by miners.  No other kind of emigrants are needed there.  The country is mountainous—a regular sea of mountains; but, writes an occasional correspondent of The Toronto Mail, ‘there are beautiful valleys, far surpassing anything you have in Ontario, and the mountains and hills furnish pasture.  Considering the climate, the rich soil, and the high price paid for all farming produce, I believe there cannot be a more desirable place for the farmer.  I have no hesitation in saying that a farm of fifty acres is worth more than a hundred in the East.  All you have to do is to sow your land with good seed and you are sure of a bountiful return.  No weevil, midge, wire-worm, potato bug, nor, in fact, any farmers’ pests, exist here.  There are no scorching hot days and sultry nights; no heavy frost or deep snow to impede work; consequently you are not driven like a slave for six months and frozen in for the other six, but have steady work all the year round.’

Other writers bear a similar testimony.  With all its advantages, however, the country has one drawback—the scarcity and high price of labour.  It seems well looked after by the Episcopalians, who have a Bishop here and several clergymen, and, as I may suppose the other denominations are equally in earnest and equally active, it is clear settlers may enjoy the advantages of the forms of religious life with which they are familiar, and under which they have been reared.

British Columbia, which entered the Canadian Confederation in 1871, is the most westerly of the Canadian Provinces.  It has a coast-line on the Pacific Ocean of about 600 miles, that is, in a straight line.  If its almost innumerable indentations and bays were measured, the coast-line would extend to several thousands of miles.

The area of the Province, according to the Census measurement, is 341,305 square miles.  Its position on the American continent is one of great commercial importance, and its resources are in keeping with its position.  If it were to be described from the characteristics of its climate, its mineral wealth, and its natural commercial relations, it might be said to be the Great Britain and California combined of the Dominion of Canada.

The Province is divided into two parts: the Islands, of which Vancouver is the principal, and the Mainland.  Vancouver is about 300 miles long, with an average breadth of about sixty miles, containing an area of about 20,000 square miles.

British Columbia has numerous harbours and rivers, some of which are of importance, and all are remarkable for their bountiful, in fact wonderful, supplies of fish.  The scenery which it possesses is magnificently beautiful.

The climate on the coast is more equable and much milder in winter than in any other part of Canada; but as the mountains are ascended, greater cold prevails, with more snow, and the characteristics of greater dryness of atmosphere which mark the climate of the interior of the continent are found.

The population of British Columbia, by the Census of 1881, did not exceed 49,459, of which 25,661 were Indians.  This comparatively sparse population is due to the hitherto isolated position of the Province; but now that railway communication between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the Dominion of Canada is being rapidly pushed forward to completion by a route which offers the easiest gradients and the most important natural commercial advantages of any possible line across the continent of America, the inducements the Province offers to settlers are beginning to attract the attention, as well of the emigrating classes of the Old World, as of the migrating classes of this continent; and population is already beginning to flow rapidly in.  It is beyond doubt that the percentage of increase which will be shown at the next decennial Census will be a statistical fact to excite men’s wonder.  Its fisheries, its forests, its mineral resources, will provide work for thousands who are starving at home.  And it will be easily reached when the Canadian Pacific Railway is completed.

I have now reached the end of my journey, and I sum up my emigration experiences.  The emigrant, if strong and industrious, and ready to take advantage of opportunities, and not averse to roughing it, will be sure to find work; but he must be shy, if he has cash, of land schemers, and I would advise him, if he thinks of settling, not to be in a hurry about it, but to take time to look around.  I have seen as fine farming country as anywhere in the world.  I have seen other parts where no one can get a living.  Amongst the emigrants I see many who must succeed anywhere, and many who will go to the wall wherever they may be.

Let me give you another illustration of the bursting of an emigration scheme.  The London dailies often have advertisements offering for a certain bonus to provide young men with homes where farming in all its branches is taught.  The London (Ont.) papers tell how a number of young fellows have been taken in in this way.  They paid the advertisers sums from thirty pounds upwards, in addition to their passage money, the consideration being that on their arrival in Ontario they were to be placed on farms and kept there at the agent’s expense.  Of course, when they reached their journey’s end, no farmers were to be found.  If a young Englishman wishes to try farming in Canada, he cannot do better than hire himself to a farmer for a year or two and keep his money in his pocket for the purchase of a farm.

But even then he must not buy a farm till he knows something about it, and he cannot be long out here before he will find out where the good land is.  A Canadian whom I met at Calgary, told me that he knew a farm near Toronto which was regularly in the market every year.  It is safe to be bought by an Englishman, who tries it for a time, gives it up in despair, and then it comes into the market again.

‘Are there any stones on the farm?’ asked an Englishman, after he had purchased his farm.

‘I only saw one,’ was the encouraging reply: and it was a truthful one.  There was but one stone, but then it embraced the surface of the whole farm.

The English purchaser must have his wits about him.  Here he is by many regarded as a stranger, and they take him in.  The poet tells us where ignorance is bliss ’tis folly to be wise.  Ignorance is not bliss in Canada, emigrants really must have their wits about them or they will suffer much.

Near Moosomin there is some fine country where many English have settled.  Only last week an Englishman selected a farm in that locality for a homestead.  He at once proceeded there, having at considerable expense hired a conveyance for his wife and four children.  When he got there he found the land already occupied.  To add to his troubles, when he returned to Moosomin one of his children died; the result is that the wife has grown home-sick, the poor man disheartened; he wants to return to England, but he has already exhausted his means.  This want of harmony between the land office and the guides, according to The Manitoba Free Press, is said to be of frequent occurrence.  The Dominion Government ought to see to this.  They are eager to promote emigration, but many such cases will make English farmers naturally a little reluctant to come out.

CHAPTER X.

DANGERS OF THE ROCKIES.—PRAIRIE FIRES.—THE RETURN.—PORT ARTHUR.—MIGRANTS.

There is a great deal of snow in the Rockies.  In June that snow begins to melt.  The result is, a violent body of water rushes down, which makes the railway people very uncomfortable.

On Sunday I met the engine-driver of the train by which I was to travel east next morning.  At Holt City it seems no one knows from what particular spot the train will start.

‘You won’t start without me?’ I said.

‘No; I will look to see whether you are on board.’

‘But,’ said I, ‘you must leave at five, whether I am on board or not.’

‘Oh! as to that,’ he said, ‘no one can make me start before I am ready.  But,’ said he, ‘perhaps we may not get away at all.  I don’t like the look of the bridge, and there is a deal of water about.’

I smiled incredulously.  Had not I seen, only an hour before, with my own eyes, a special train arrive from the west filled with labourers and freight?  If that could cross in safety, surely our lighter train could do the same.

Thus reasoning, I lay down with a light heart in my caboose, having invoked, not the saints, but every decent Christian I could find, to take care that I might be aroused at four p.m., in order that I might have a good wash before I started on my little run of 1,500 miles, as far as Port Arthur.

Just as I was falling into the arms of Morpheus, to speak poetically—a habit to which I was much given in my earlier days—a fellow-traveller came rushing into the caboose, saying timidly:

‘You’d better get on board at once.  The bridge has given way, and they may go across at once,’ and so saying, he left me in the dark.

However, I managed to jump out of my bed, collect my luggage, and scramble down the plank, the only and somewhat perilous means of access to my caboose, and stumble along the confusing lines of railway by which Holt City is adorned, and climb up into a car, wondering much all the while why we should start at all, when the bridge had partly given way, or whether I had come all that distance merely to find a watery grave.  In the car I found a company as grotesque and rough as any I had yet seen anywhere, discussing the situation with more or less earnestness.

The bridge, I heard, was being repaired; that was a comfort.  But still no one knew when we should start.  Now and then we moved a few feet forward, or a few feet backward; but, in reality, I believe we remained in the same position all night, and started at the usual hour next morning.  But the horror of that night was something inexpressible.  Sleep was quite out of the question.  You can’t sleep in an American railway-car unless you are a navvy or a contractor—who can sleep anywhere.  In England, even in a third-class carriage, the chances are you can lie down at your full length and sleep.  In Canada you can’t do that, as the seats are too short.  So there I sat, bolt upright, all through that tedious night, watching for the light of day, while my companions sat smoking and talking and expectorating.  In a playful moment one of them suggested that they should all take off their boots.  Fortunately the proposition did not meet with universal approval, and I was saved that horror.

In the Rockies life is not all beer and ’baccy.  One day there was an alarm of fire.  It seems the woods are on fire all day long, and week after week.  In this way much valuable timber is destroyed, and no one knows who does the mischief, or how it will terminate.  Daily we saw the smoke of a forest fire; one day the flames came so close to Holt City that everyone was alarmed.  If a spark or two reached the place where the explosives were stored, Holt City and all its inhabitants might have been blown to atoms.  Down in the prairies fire does a vast amount of mischief to the settler, who awakes in the night to find his tent or house reduced to ashes, and all his worldly goods destroyed.  Such cases are of frequent occurrence, especially at this season of the year, when the settler sets fire to the prairie before ploughing, or to insure a better crop of grass.  One dark night, in particular, I remember the prairie fire lent quite a mournful grandeur to the scene.  Then there came a day I shall never forget as long as I live.  A Canadian summer may have its peculiar charms, but I candidly own, not being a salamander, it is far too hot for me.  On that particular day the heat was intense.  It affected everyone.  Those who dared drank gallons of iced water, others pulled off their coats and collars and lay down on the cushions with which the sleeping-car is plentifully provided, and went off to sleep.  It was in vain one tried to pass away the time in smoking—it was too hot for that.  Newspapers and cheap novels were all neglected—conversation was out of the question.  Everyone seemed on the point of giving up the ghost.  Even the blackie, who invariably acts as conductor to the sleeping-car—and who is about the only civil official (with the exception of the steamboat attendants, who are models of good behaviour) one meets in Canadian travel, seemed, thinly clad as he was, quite overcome.  The sun took all the colour out of his cheeks, and he became quite pale—almost white.

In the course of our return journey we stopped at Moose Jaw for supper, and then I witnessed a new development of prairie life in the shape of a thunder-storm, which seemed to me unusually vivid and protracted.  The lightning was grand as it swept over the wide sea of grass, making everything as bright as noon-day, and then all was dark again.  It brought us a rain that had really healing in its wings.  While the heat lasted I was a martyr to prickly heat.  It seemed to me that I was going to have small-pox or measles.  I had little pimples all over me, and as to my wrists, they were really painful, and I could not keep from scratching with a vivacity which a Scotchman might have envied.  Was it that vulgar disease to which, it is said, the gallant Scot is peculiarly liable?  I could not say.  I had shaken hands with so many filthy Indians, and it might be that, as I learn they are much afflicted in that way.  Happily the thunder-storm cooled the air, and I felt all the better for it.  When I got as far as Port Arthur, and inhaled the cool air of Lake Superior, I suffered no more from unpleasant irritation of the skin.  It was with joy I embarked on the C.P.R.’s fine steamer, the Alberta, for Owen Sound.  But even travelling on Lake Superior has its disadvantages.  The water of the Lake is intensely cold, and when the sun beats fiercely on it there is sure to be a fog.  Such happened to be the case on my return, and we ploughed slowly along for a while, seeing hardly anything of the beauty of the scene, while every few minutes we were cheered by the dismal notes of the fog-horn.  Fortunately the fog lifted, and then what a display we had of islands, green as emerald, on the tranquil sea!  I must add, also, I had good company everywhere, with the exception of the great Sir John M’Neill, who had his meals apart from us at a table all to himself, and an English clergyman from Staffordshire, whom a Canadian gentleman described to me as ‘a regular crank,’ whatever that may mean.  The parson is going to write a book, so he tells the people; but he shuns me, which is a pity, as I met a friend at Calgary who told me they had great fun with the parson on their way up from Winnipeg, telling him all sorts of cock-and-bull stories, which he greedily entered in his note-book.

I must give you one more sketch of a Canadian town as an illustration of the enterprise and pluck which are the main characteristics of the Canadian of to-day.  If you look at the map, you will see Port Arthur is situated in Thunder Bay, and Thunder Bay, when you pass the rocky barrier by which it is encircled, opens out into Lake Superior.

Thunder Bay is a sheet of water some 13 by 19 miles in area, sheltered from the wild storms which sweep over the northern lakes by the Pie and Welcome Islands and the Thunder Cape on one side, and by the terraced bluffs of ever-green forest on the other; forming thus an unsurpassed harbour for extent and accommodation, and having claim to be what its admirers say it is, the prettiest of all the American Lakes.

It is not an agricultural district that surrounds Port Arthur, though it is a fact that there are vast stretches of rich lands within its borders, including the Kamanistique and other valleys, on which at least 3,000 families could settle and get a good living by agriculture.

The timber resources of the surrounding country, which must find its centre and point of collection in the quiet waters of the bay, comprise thousands of square miles of spruce and other trees; while iron, copper, zinc, and silver are to be found in the neighbouring rocks.  Gold also is said to be hidden in the bowels of the earth; though not yet discovered in paying quantities.  However this may be, one thing is clear, that from Thunder Bay the whole agricultural exports of the countless fertile acres of the Canadian North-West must find an outlet.  Truly did the Marquis of Lorne, when here, describe it as ‘The Silver Gate.’

Port Arthur—as it was termed when Sir Garnet Wolseley arrived here on his way to suppress the Riel revolt in the North-West, out of compliment to the Duke of Connaught—is in reality one of the few places in Canada that have a history.  As early as the beginning of the sixteenth century, some of the French settlers had formed an idea that the great Lake Superior was a highway to the vast fur-producing countries of the North-West, although not till 1641 did any white man venture upon its waters.  In 1678 a Frenchman built himself a house in the vicinity of Port Arthur, and commenced trading with the surrounding Indians for their furs.

In 1857 the attention of the Canadian Government was called to the spot, and they sent out commissioners to explore, who, in 1859, published a report which created quite a sensation all over Canada.  In due time the C.P.R., which is the great mainspring of all the North-West, took up Port Arthur, had all their stores and men carted there, and now Port Arthur has a grand future before it, of which it is impossible to predict the whole extent.  I have great faith in Port Arthur.  It must in time be another Montreal or Toronto.  Moose Jaw is going down.  It will be long before Calgary will be much of a place.  The Silver City is half deserted; and at Winnipeg the boom has burst and bankruptcy prevails; but Port Arthur is bound to go ahead.

I spent there a night on my return, and saw a marvellous change—even since my visit there a fortnight previously.  Then people were hard at work putting up wooden shops; now those shops are fitted up with glass fronts, and already filled with merchandise from all quarters of the earth, though in many cases the upper parts of the building are in an incomplete state.  Every day ships arrive from the American side; thus, within a couple of days previous to my arrival, 20,000 tons of coal had been landed.  There are steamers of all sorts and sizes in the harbour, constantly coming in or going out.  On one side a new elevator has been erected, on the other side is a great store of lumber and a saw-mill.

Yesterday Port Arthur was a township, now it is incorporated as a city, and rejoices in a mayor.  The place is full of hotels, which charge high prices, give very little for the money, and do a roaring trade.  A very handsome English church is being erected; just by, the Presbyterians are building one equally handsome, only a little smaller.  The Roman Catholics make quite a grand show with their brick church and convent and schools, while the Methodists have a very plain and ugly imitation of an English church, with its steeple all in wood and painted white, which attests, at any rate, if not their taste, their influence and wealth.  I visited the school-room, which was filled with bright and well-fed boys and girls, where the children are taught free, as they are all over Canada—where they have, by-the-bye, a compulsory law, which is never enforced, as it is impossible to do so.  And then I made my way to the best-looking building in the town—the emigrants’ shed—where already 3,600 emigrants have this season been lodged gratis by the Dominion Government previous to their passing onwards to the North-West.

People tell me there is no room for mechanics in Canada.  In Port Arthur I see them in constant demand.  At one shop window I see a notice to the effect that 10 carpenters are required, at another a demand for painters, while a third shop window seeks to secure good tinsmiths.  At the chief draper’s shop there is a notice stating four good assistants are required.  What a pity the discontented men whom I left at Montreal, because work was not offered them immediately they landed, did not come thus far!  As to rockmen and labourers, they are wanted by the hundred.  Surely, Port Arthur must be a good place for the working man and the working girl.  Even at Calgary they were paying the female helps at the hotel—as sour a set as I ever saw—and who were constantly quarrelling with John Smith, the Chinaman cook—as much as 40 dollars a month.  But even out here a man must have brains.

‘I came out here seven years ago,’ said a gentleman to me as we sat on one of the rocks which line Port Arthur, ‘and could find nothing to do.  I was brought up in a foundry, and had saved 1,100 dollars.  I went all round; no one could give me a job.  Then I began buying a few hides; this brought me into contact with a great fur merchant at Chicago—he employed me as his agent at 80 dollars a month.  Then I gave that up and turned miller, and the year before last I traded to the extent of a quarter of a million dollars.  Last year I was too eager, and lost a lot of money; but this year I hope to get it all back again.’

Why cannot an English emigrant be equally successful?  Is it because we do not send out the right sort of men?

‘There is not one man in a hundred that comes out here from London who is of any use,’ said an old Toronto trader—himself an Englishman—to me.  ‘I never call myself an Englishman,’ said he.  ‘When I go to London I always say I am a Canadian.  I am ashamed of the name of Englishman.  What would Sir Garnet Wolseley have done when he was here had it not have been for the Canadian Volunteers?’

I am glad to hear, however, that he had nothing but praise for the Scotch settlers Lady Cathcart was sending out.  She advances them money, and they pay her back a good rate of interest.  Why cannot other people do the same?  Another question, also, may be asked: Why cannot certain Canadian land companies, who really offer purchasers a fair bargain, put up a few houses on their separate farms?  The settler has to build his house under every disadvantage.  I am sure they could build the houses by contract at half the expense; and they could have a mortgage on the farm, which would ensure them in every case against loss, and which might add materially to their profits as well.

If the crops this year turn out well in the North-West, and, according to present prospects, there is every reason to suppose they will, the farmers will pour into the country in a way which they have never done before, and the prosperity of the North-West will be placed on a solid basis.  Be that as it may, there are bright days in store for Port Arthur.

On the green forest, rising up above the town and overlooking Thunder Bay, it is intended to build a first-class summer hotel for the comfort of holiday makers and health seekers.  There the visitor will enjoy fine cool air in the sultry heat of summer, while bathing in the lake will invigorate his enfeebled frame.  The waters abound with fish.  Islands and lakes and rivers tempt the yachtsman.  If the workmen who squander their hard-earned wages in reckless drunkenness would but learn to be sober, few places on the Canadian lakes would be more enjoyable than Port Arthur.

I cannot leave Canada without speaking of its Grand Trunk Railway, which meets the emigrant at Port Levi when he lands at Quebec, and which he will undoubtedly often patronise if he tarries long in the land.  It has built the Victoria Bridge at Montreal, one of the wonders of Canada—a tubular structure of magnificent proportions, which spans the St. Lawrence, and gives uninterrupted communication to the western traffic with that of the United States.  Including the abutments, the bridge is 9,084 feet in length.  The tubes rest on twenty-four piers, the main tubes being sixty feet above the level of the river.  It may well be called the Grand Trunk Railway, as it operates under one management over six thousand miles of first-class railway road.  Having close connection at Port Huron, Detroit and Chicago with the principal Western American lines, it offers great advantages to emigrants to all parts of the compass.  At Montreal I had the pleasure of a long chat with Mr. Joseph Hickson, the general manager, who takes a deep interest in the subject of emigration, and Mr. W. Wainwright, the assistant-manager, to whom I am indebted and grateful for many acts of kindness, especially welcome to the stranger in a strange land.  It is the Grand Trunk that takes the traveller over Niagara Falls—on the International Suspension Bridge connecting the Canadian Railways with those of the States.  This structure, which is 250 feet above the water, commands a fine view up to the Falls.  It is to be feared that as long as Canada and the United States have separate tariffs there will be not a little smuggling along this bridge.  When I was there I heard of a Canadian judge, who with his family had been stopping at one or other of the hotels on the Canadian side.  One fine morning some of the ladies of the party walked off to the American side, and returned laden with bargains which had paid no duty.  In their innocence they boasted of the little transaction to the judge.  ‘How can I,’ said he indignantly, ‘punish people for smuggling, if I find my own family do it?’ and the ladies had to pay the duty, so the story goes, after all.

CHAPTER XI.

BACK TO ENGLAND.—CANADIAN HOSPITALITY.—THE ASSYRIAN MONARCH.—HOME.

My time was up, and I had to be off, after we got a look at pleasant London in the wood, as my Canadian friends who have been to England call it.  I came back from Chicago to New York, and had again to encounter the horrors of nights in a Pullman sleeping-car.  Why cannot the railway authorities separate the part of the car devoted to the gentlemen from that part inhabited by the ladies?  The way in which the sexes are mixed up at night is, to say the least, unpleasant.  I shall never forget my last experience in a Pullman sleeping-car.  An ancient dame with blue spectacles, my vis-à-vis, as the shades of evening came on, gave me the horrors.  In my despair I began undressing, thinking that the outraged female would rush away in disgust.  Alas! she had stronger nerves than I calculated, and there she sat gazing serenely with her tinted orbs till I plunged myself behind my curtained berth, to encounter, early in the morning, once more those eyes.

New York and Boston are full of fairy forms.  Why don’t they travel?  The change would be pleasant for sore eyes like mine.

No wonder I sat all that night thinking of the great kindness I had received in Canada, and regretting especially that I had refused an invitation to dine that evening at the home of one of the leading barristers of Toronto, to meet some clergymen there who were familiar with my name, and who wished to meet me.

Surely I did wrong to leave Toronto, with all its friendly faces and kindly hearts.  It will be long ere I cease to remember how the Canadians made me at home, as I met them on the rail, or on the boat, or in the hotel.

Said a London Evangelist to me: ‘You will find the Canadians a cold people, who will show you no hospitality.  While I was there not one of them invited me to have a cup of tea.’

All I can say is, I found the Canadians quite the reverse.  But then my friend went on a mission, and is a man of very serious views, while I travelled merely to see a land of whose wonders I had heard much, to talk to sinners as well as saints, and to learn from them what I could.

I was a great reformer once myself, and had glorious visions which never came to pass.  In youth we have all such dreams.  Now, as the days darken round me and the years, I seek to put up with the shortcomings of my brother-man, trusting that he in his Christian charity may extend a similar forbearance to my own.

I came back in the Assyrian Monarch.  I was glad I did so.  That fine ship has a distinguished record.  It has carried no end of theatricals to New York; it did the same kind office for Jumbo: it carried troops and horses to Egypt; and when we English undertook to punish Arabi, it was a home for the refugees for a while.

Perhaps we have no ship more noticeable than the Assyrian Monarch, belonging to the Monarch Line, which runs weekly, I fancy, between New York and London.

It is a great treat in the fine weather to take that route.  You are a little longer at sea—you glide along the south coast till you reach the Scilly Isles, and the ships of the company are all that can be desired.

It is a great deal of trouble and expense to some to go with all their goods and chattels to Liverpool, then unpack them, and get them down to the landing-stage, and then repack them in one or other of the far-famed steamers of that busy spot, and all this you save if you patronize the ships of the Monarch Line, which carry chiefly cargo, with a few saloon passengers as well.

We had a very heavy cargo on board the Assyrian Monarch as we came back from New York.  We carried 260 bullocks, besides cheese and grain, to make glad the heart and fill the stomach, and thus one felt that if the screw were to fail or the fog to hinder a rapid transit, there was corn in Egypt, and that there was something to fall back on.  Happily, we were not driven to that alternative.  We fared well in the saloon of the Assyrian Monarch; so well, indeed, that a poor elderly lady, who seemed at death’s door when we started, became quite vigorous, comparatively speaking, by the time we ended our voyage.

We had more freedom in the way of sitting up late and having lights than is possible in a crowded passenger ship, and we came more into contact with the captain of the ship and his merry men.

In the case of the Assyrian Monarch this was a great advantage, as Captain Harrison is a good companion as well as an able navigator, and I felt myself safe in his hands, that is, as far as anyone can be safe at sea.

Further, I felt that the chances were in my favour.  The Assyrian Monarch had carried over the Atlantic, in stormy weather, the highly-respected and ever-to-be-regretted by Londoners Jumbo; surely it could be trusted to perform the same kind office for myself in the summer season, when the air is still and the seas are calm; and so it did, though every now and then we encountered that greatest of all dangers at sea, fog, more or less dense, especially on the Banks of Newfoundland, where the ice-laden waters of the Arctic come in contact with the warmer waves of the Gulf Stream.  As our course was very fortunately much to the south, we had a good deal of the latter.

That Gulf Stream was a revelation to me.  When I took my morning bath it seemed as if I were in warm water, and the new forms of life it fostered and developed were particularly pleasant to a casual observer like myself.  There one could see the nautilus, or the Portugeuse man-of-war, as it is familiarly termed, in the language of the poet,

‘Put out a tier of oars on either side,
Spread to the wafting breeze a twofold sail,’

and cruel, big-headed sharks, which, indeed, followed us almost all the way to England (the fact is that now, when so many cattle are thrown overboard, the Atlantic abounds with sharks), and lovely flying-fish like streaks of silver flashing along the deep and boundless blue ocean.  Of these latter one flew on board.  It met with a cruel fate.  It was eaten by the first officer of the Assyrian Monarch for breakfast.  It ought to have choked him.  It did nothing of the kind; he, hardened sinner that he was, enjoyed it greatly, and said that it was as good as a whiting.

In the Gulf Stream we found the usual number of whales and porpoises.  The latter would play around the bow or race along the side of the ship in considerable quantities of all sorts of sizes.  There were other fish of which I know not the names to be seen occasionally leaping out of the water as high and repeatedly as possible, as if a shark were in their midst seeking whom he might devour.

One sight I shall never forget in the Gulf Stream.  It was that of a tortoise.  I was leaning over the ship’s side, when something big and round seemed to be coming to the surface.  I could not make out what it was; then all at once the truth flashed upon me as he wobbled along, paddling with his fins, his head erect, his little eyes peering at the ship as if he wondered what the dickens it was, and what business it had there.  He seemed to be treading the water.

‘I saw him but a moment,
But methinks I see him now.’

The sight gave me quite an appetite, though my friend Sir Henry Thompson will insist upon it that turtle soup is made of conger-eel, but in the wide Atlantic one has time to think of such things; day by day passes and you see nothing but the ocean—not even a distant sail, or the smoke of a passing steamer.

People complain of the uneventfulness of life on board a ship.  That, however, is a matter of great thankfulness.  A collision or a shipwreck are exciting, but they are disagreeable, nevertheless.  It seems the homeward voyage is always the pleasantest as far as the sea is concerned, the wind being more frequently in the west than in any other quarter.  Perhaps that is one reason why the Americans are so ready to cross the Atlantic.  When I left New York, Cook’s office, in the Broadway, was full of tourists, including Mrs. Langtry and other distinguished personages.  Mr. John Cook seems as popular in New York as he is elsewhere.  Indeed, I was confidentially informed that he was engaged in organizing a personally-conducted tour for the relief of Gordon and the capture of the Mahdi, and I hear from Egypt that he has a chance of being made Khedive, a position which I am certain he would fill with credit to himself and advantage to the people.  Of course, there is a little exaggeration in this, but the American tourist has good reason to revere the name of Cook, and so have we all.  As much as anyone he has promoted travel between the Old World and the New, and has made us better friends.  It is to be hoped that every steamer that crosses the Atlantic does something similar.

I must own, however, that the nearer I approached England the more I felt ashamed of my native land.  The weather was villainous.  It rained every day, and the worst of it was, I had had the audacity to assure the Americans on board that we had dry weather in England, that occasionally we saw the sun, and that we were not a web-footed race.  Fortunately, at the time of writing this I have not yet encountered any of my American friends, or I should feel, as they say, uncommonly mean.  However, the weather was fine enough to admit of a good look at Bishop’s Rock, the name of the lighthouse at the Scilly Isles, where we got our first sight of land; you can imagine how we all rushed on deck to see that.  In fine weather, I say, by all means return from America in one of the fine, steady, well-built ships of the Monarch Line.  The scenery is far finer than that offered by Queenstown and Liverpool.  You have the Scilly Isles to look at, and the Land’s End, and the Lizards.  At Portland Bill we laid off till a pilot came on board, and we had a good look at the establishment where so many smart men are sent for a season, and Weymouth heading the distant bay; and then what a fine sweep you have up the Channel—crowded with craft of all kinds, from the eight thousand ton steamer to the frail and awkward fishing lugger—and round the Nore; whilst old towns and castles, speaking not alone of the living present, but of the dead and buried past, are to be seen.  Even Americans, fond as they are of modern life, feel the charm of that; whilst to the returning traveller the landscape speaks of ‘home, sweet home.’

CHAPTER XII.

COLONIZATION IN CANADA.

I was glad to see, the other day, Mr. Morley’s letter advocating the propriety of taking up land and settling on it some of the too numerous class who drift into our great cities, finding no work to do in the country, there to lead indifferent lives and come to an untimely end.

It is a step I have repeatedly advocated.  Land is cheap enough now; there is no occasion to wait for an Act of Parliament.  It is as easy to buy an estate, and to split it up into small portions, of which each shareholder will become in time the proprietor, as to form a building society, and thus enable any man to become his own landlord.  But there are certain drawbacks.  There is the parson to be dealt with, who will be sure to claim his higher tithes; there are burdens on property, of which the working man, who is told by Mr. Chamberlain that he is more heavily taxed than any other class of the community (is not the reverse of this the case?), has no idea; and last, and not least, there is the unfitness for peasant proprietorship of the average English workman, who has no idea of living on the scant fare of the peasant proprietor of Belgium or France, or, I fear, of working as hard.  Granting, however, that he does, the great fact remains, that peasant proprietorship is no remedy for all the ills of life, and that France has its surplus population quite as badly off, and a great deal more difficult to deal with than our own.

What is to be done to relieve the distress, the existence of which all must own and deplore?  I answer, Emigrate.

Emigration is the natural means of relieving the poverty of a nation.  Every man is an emigrant.  No one lives and dies in the village in which he was born.  He finds his way to the neighbouring town in search of work; then to the great metropolis; then across the water to one or other of our colonies.

Greece and Rome realized the fact that under no conditions could a certain tract of territory maintain more than a certain number of people, and had their settled plans of emigration.  In England, at any rate since the days of the Pilgrim Fathers, we have too much left the matter to chance, and an ordinary emigrant, with the ordinary want of backbone, it seems to me, is just as likely to go to the dogs in New York, or Toronto, or Melbourne, as in London.  What we want is what is now being attempted by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, the leading members of which have established a Church Colonization Land Society.  Its object is to assist, in a practicable, businesslike manner, on a remunerative basis, the great and pressing work of emigration to the British colonies in connection with the Church of England.

This society, I learn from a proof of a circular just placed in my hands, issued by Canon Prothero, the chairman, will, under proper safeguards, render temporary pecuniary aid in such cases as approve themselves to the council, take charge of the emigrants on the journey to the colony, provide for their settlement on lands selected, from those acquired by the society, provide temporary dwellings until the emigrants can put together their own (the materials for which may be bought ready to hand, or the society itself can erect dwellings for them), will break up the land if desired, and secure for the emigrant religious services similar to those enjoyed at home.

The society have secured land in Manitoba, near the railway, which land has been selected by a practical farmer, a Yorkshireman, who is to act as local manager.  The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge have laid particular stress in looking after the spiritual welfare of emigrants in all our colonies; and in Liverpool, as some of my readers may be aware, the society have placed the Rev. J. Bridger, of St. Nicholas Church, as emigrants’ chaplain; chaplains have also been appointed at several other ports, such as Plymouth, Glasgow, Cork, and Londonderry; but, as is manifest, the great centre of emigration is Liverpool, and there Mr. Bridger finds his hands full.

No pains are spared to show every attention to emigrants going from or arriving at Liverpool, and occasionally Mr. Bridger sails with the first party of emigrants to their new homes.  It seems to me that the idea of the Church Colonization Society is the right one; but that it might be further extended by sending out at the same time the schoolmaster, and the doctor, and the storekeeper, and the shoemaker, and tailor, and baker, and butcher, and thus forming a village community.

It is at home impossible to realize the solitariness of the settler’s life, far away from friends and the civilizing and elevating influences of home.  I met men in the North-West who seemed to have almost lost the power of speech, so long had they been left on their homesteads alone.  Emigration in communities would do away with this state of things.  At present it is a serious sacrifice for a man with a family to emigrate into a new country.  It is not good for man to be alone.  As a rule, he degenerates on the prairie; civilization is the gift of towns to humanity.  A man does not live on bread alone.  He needs that his heart and head be stimulated by contact with his fellow-men; not, as in the old country, in consequence of the extensive competition, by rivalry for the crust of bread, but by mutual aid and companionship in the great work of subduing the wilderness and making it to rejoice and blossom as the rose.

In a month or two the emigration season will have commenced, and there is no time to spare.  Why cannot other denominations do what the Church of England is now preparing to do?  Canada can feed and fatten millions, who in England will have to live as a burden on the community.  There is many a man who does ill here who would do well there.  We are all more or less the creatures of circumstances.  In England the beershop has degraded the community, and many a man finds it hard to get away from its foul companionship: here, he declines into a criminal or a sot; there, not only will he be neither the one nor the other, but he will develop all the better tendencies of his character, and become a man.  Make him a peasant-proprietor at home, and the chances are the old Adam in him will be too strong.  Plant him in a colony, he feels in a new world, with a new aim.  Here, he is looked down on: there, he is hailed as a man and a brother.  We who are old must stop at home; but there is no reason why our sons should do so.  Why should a young man be a drudge because his father was a mere hewer of wood and drawer of water, when in a colony there are many ways of becoming well-off to a man who has good muscles and brains, has the sense to avail himself of opportunity when it occurs, and to keep his money in his pocket?  I say Canada, because Canada is easy to get at, and is yet almost in a virgin state.  It is only recently that it has been opened up by the Canadian Government and the Canadian Pacific Railway.  I say Canada, because Canada is English, and I am an Englishman; because the Canadian Government does all it can to help the emigrant; and because the Canadians are mostly healthy, honest men.  Englishmen thrive there better, at any rate, than they do in the United States, or in South Africa.  Arrangements for a colony can easily be made.  In London, the Canadian Pacific Railway have a fine office in Cannon Street, where you can see for yourself what are the results of farming in the North-West, and where you will find its courteous and intelligent representative, Mr. Alexander Begg, whose only fault is that he will persist in maintaining that the English climate is killing him, and that he enjoys much better health in that frosty Canada, the cold of which is a bugbear that has kept too many away.  Go to him, and he will tell you where to plant your colony.  The money which is now squandered in keeping paupers at home surely might be better spent in forming village communities in the boundless plains of the North-West.  Let Dissenters imitate the Church.  Let them have their communities as the Church of England seek to have theirs.  Some people say the Salvationists are a nuisance in our crowded cities: let General Booth betake himself to Manitoba; he will find few people to complain of his processions there.

But this is no subject to trifle about; day by day the poor are becoming poorer, and the middle-classes and the rich also.  The leaders of the coming democracy seem unwilling to recognise that fact, and are angry when I tell them it is better to emigrate than to agitate in the old country for the ruin of the capitalist, the destruction of our trade, the abolition of the landlord, the advent of the working man’s candidate, and the rights of man.  Are they the friends of the poor who bid him stay where he is to cheapen the labour market, already overstocked; to crowd the cities with an unwholesome pauperism; to see his sons ripen into thieves, and his daughters cast on the streets; and to look forward to the workhouse as the refuge of his old age?  Even if we had a revolution as complete as that of France, what then?  Over-population will breed sorrow and sickness and want and despair all the same.  In Canada, the man who cares to work is sure of his reward; he has a future before him and his.

I am glad to find, since the above was written, there has been formed by the Congregational Union a special emigration scheme, of which the Rev. Andrew Mearns, of the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, is Secretary, and that they have already sent out over a hundred qualified emigrants.  The outfit and passage money of each man costs £7, and it is proposed to give each £2 when he arrives in Canada.  The men to be selected are drawn from the ranks of the unemployed who are brought together at the various Mission Halls.  The case of each applicant is fully examined, and the men themselves are thoroughly tested as to their honest desire and ability to work.  The men having been approved and their record found satisfactory, they are sent to the emigration agent of the colony, who also examines into the cases of the various applicants.  This acceptance having been notified, the next and, perhaps, the greatest difficulty is to provide a temporary home for them in the colony to which they are to be sent.  As the result of much labour, each man will be sent to the care of some gentleman in the colony, who will see that he is properly provided for, and started in a fair way to obtain work.  They are thus going to various towns in the Dominion, such as Kingston, Ontario, Ottawa, Hamilton, London, Toronto, St. Thomas’s, Bellville, and Guelph.  Among those to whom introduction has been given are directors of railways, officers of Christian Associations, gardeners, farmers, merchants, and various ministers of influence.  It is almost unnecessary to add that the spiritual needs of the men have not been forgotten, and in the kit of each one have been packed a Bible, supplied by the kindness of the Bible Society—who have intimated their willingness to make a similar presentation to every man the Union sends out—and an assortment of suitable and practical religious literature.

Thus far have I told the story of my Canadian experiences.  Those who wish to fully pursue the subject will do well to get ‘Picturesque Canada,’ now being published by Messrs. Cassell and Co.

the end.

billing and sons, printers, guildford, surrey.

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Table of Contents

- PICTURES of CANADIAN LIFE

- CONTENTS.

- LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

- CHAPTER I.

- CHAPTER II.

- CHAPTER III.

- CHAPTER IV.

- CHAPTER V.

- CHAPTER VI.

- CHAPTER VII.

- CHAPTER VIII.

- CHAPTER IX.

- CHAPTER X.

- CHAPTER XI.

- CHAPTER XII.

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE