We got clean away from the Three Cities and the close-tilled farming and orchard districts, into the Land of Little Lakes—­a country of rushing streams, clear-eyed ponds, and boulders among berry-bushes; all crying ‘Trout’ and ‘Bear.’

Not so very long ago only a few wise people kept holiday in that part of the world, and they did not give away their discoveries.  Now it has become a summer playground where people hunt and camp at large.  The names of its further rivers are known in England, and men, otherwise sane, slip away from London into the birches, and come out again bearded and smoke-stained, when the ice is thick enough to cut a canoe.  Sometimes they go to look for game; sometimes for minerals—­perhaps, even, oil.  No one can prophesy.  ’We are only at the beginning of things.’

Said an Afrite of the Railway as we passed in our magic carpet:  ’You’ve no notion of the size of our tourist-traffic.  It has all grown up since the early ’Nineties.  The trolley car teaches people in the towns to go for little picnics.  When they get more money they go for long ones.  All this Continent will want playgrounds soon.  We’re getting them ready.’

The girl from Winnipeg saw the morning frost lie white on the long grass at the lake edges, and watched the haze of mellow golden birch leaves as they dropped.  ‘Now that’s the way trees ought to turn,’ she said.  ’Don’t you think our Eastern maple is a little violent in colour?’ Then we passed through a country where for many hours the talk in the cars was of mines and the treatment of ores.  Men told one tales—­prospectors’ yarns of the sort one used to hear vaguely before Klondike or Nome were public property.  They did not care whether one believed or doubted.  They, too, were only at the beginning of things—­silver perhaps, gold perhaps, nickel perhaps.  If a great city did not arise at such a place—­the very name was new since my day—­it would assuredly be born within a few miles of it.  The silent men boarded the cars, and dropped off, and disappeared beyond thickets and hills precisely as the first widely spaced line of skirmishers fans out and vanishes along the front of the day’s battle.

One old man sat before me like avenging Time itself, and talked of prophecies of evil, that had been falsified. ’They said there wasn’t nothing here excep’ rocks an’ snow. They said there never wouldn’t be nothing here excep’ the railroad.  There’s them that can’t see yit,’ and he gimleted me with a fierce eye.  ‘An’ all the while, fortunes is made—­piles is made—­right under our noses.’

‘Have you made your pile?’ I asked.

He smiled as the artist smiles—­all true prospectors have that lofty smile—­’Me?  No.  I’ve been a prospector most o’ my time, but I haven’t lost anything.  I’ve had my fun out of the game.  By God, I’ve had my fun out of it!

I told him how I had once come through when land and timber grants could have been picked up for half less than nothing.