Warehouses, railway-sidings, and such are only counters in the White Man’s Game, which can be swept up and re-dealt as the play varies.  It was the spirit in the thin dancing air—­the new spirit of the new city—­which rejoiced me.  Winnipeg has Things in abundance, but has learned to put them beneath her feet, not on top of her mind, and so is older than many cities.  None the less the Things had to be shown—­for what shopping is to the woman showing off his town is to the right-minded man.  First came the suburbs—­miles on miles of the dainty, clean-outlined, wooden-built houses, where one can be so happy and so warm, each unjealously divided from its neighbour by the lightest of boundaries.  One could date them by their architecture, year after year, back to the Early ’Nineties, which is when civilisation began; could guess within a few score dollars at their cost and the incomes of their owners, and could ask questions about the new domestic appliances of to-day.

‘Asphalt streets and concrete sidewalks came up a few years ago,’ said our host as we trotted over miles of it.  ’We found it the only way to fight the prairie mud.  Look!’ Where the daring road ended, there lay unsubdued, level with the pale asphalt, the tenacious prairie, over which civilisation fought her hub-deep way to the West.  And with asphalt and concrete they fight the prairie back every building season.  Next came the show-houses, built by rich men with an eye to the honour and glory of their city, which is the first obligation of wealth in a new land.

We twisted and turned among broad, clean, tree-lined, sunlit boulevards and avenues, all sluiced down with an air that forbade any thought of fatigue, and talked of city government and municipal taxation, till, in a certain silence, we were shown a suburb of uncared-for houses, shops, and banks, whose sides and corners were rubbed greasy by the shoulders of loafers.  Dirt and tin cans lay about the street.  Yet it was not the squalor of poverty so much as the lack of instinct to keep clean.  One race prefers to inhabit there.

Next a glimpse of a cold, white cathedral, red-brick schools almost as big (thank goodness!) as some convents; hospitals, institutions, a mile or so of shops, and then a most familiar-feeling lunch at a Club which would have amazed my Englishman at Montreal, where men, not yet old, talked of Fort Garry as they remembered it, and tales of the founding of the city, of early administrative shifts and accidents, mingled with the younger men’s prophecies and frivolities.

There are a few places still left where men can handle big things with a light touch, and take more for granted in five minutes than an Englishman at home could puzzle out in a year.  But one would not meet many English at a lunch in a London club who took the contract for building London Wall or helped bully King John into signing Magna Charta.

I had two views of the city—­one on a gray day from the roof of a monster building, whence it seemed to overflow and fill with noises the whole vast cup of the horizon; and still, all round its edge, jets of steam and the impatient cries of machinery showed it was eating out into the Prairie like a smothered fire.