To the Westerner such spots are common enough; he sees them not as fixtures, but as places in a stage of transformation.  By every side track and telegraph station on every transcontinental line they spring up, centers of productive activity, growing into orderly towns and finally attaining the dignity of cities.  To her, fresh from trim farmsteads and rural communities that began setting their houses in order when Washington wintered at Valley Forge, Hopyard stood forth sordid and unkempt.  And as happens to many a one in like case, a wave of sickening loneliness engulfed her, and she eyed the speeding Limited as one eyes a departing friend.

“How could one live in a place like this?” she asked herself.

But she had neither Slave of the Lamp at her beck, nor any Magic Carpet to transport her elsewhere.  At any rate, she reflected, Hopyard was not her abiding-place.  She hoped that her destination would prove more inviting.

Beside the platform were ranged two touring cars.  Three or four of those who had alighted entered these.  Their baggage was piled over the hoods, buckled on the running boards.  The driver of one car approached her.  “Hot Springs?” he inquired tersely.

She affirmed this, and he took her baggage, likewise her trunk check when she asked how that article would be transported to the lake.  She had some idea of route and means, from her brother’s written instruction, but she thought he might have been there to meet her.  At least he would be at the Springs.

So she was whirled along a country road, jolted in the tonneau between a fat man from Calgary and a rheumatic dame on her way to take hot sulphur baths at St. Allwoods.  She passed seedy farmhouses, primitive in construction, and big barns with moss plentifully clinging on roof and gable.  The stretch of charred stumps was left far behind, but in every field of grain and vegetable and root great butts of fir and cedar rose amid the crops.  Her first definitely agreeable impression of this land, which so far as she knew must be her home, was of those huge and numerous stumps contending with crops for possession of the fields.  Agreeable, because it came to her forcibly that it must be a sturdy breed of men and women, possessed of brawn and fortitude and high courage, who made their homes here.  Back in her country, once beyond suburban areas, the farms lay like the squares of a chess board, trim and orderly, tamely subdued to agriculture.  Here, at first hand, she saw how man attacked the forest and conquered it.  But the conquest was incomplete, for everywhere stood those stubborn roots, six and eight and ten feet across, contending with man for its primal heritage, the soil, perishing slowly as perish the proud remnants of a conquered race.