It was a woman, speaking out of the shadow, who said, what we all felt, ‘You see, we just love our town,’

‘So do we,’ I said, and it slid behind us.

MOUNTAINS AND THE PACIFIC

The Prairie proper ends at Calgary, among the cattle-ranches, mills, breweries, and three million acre irrigation works.  The river that floats timber to the town from the mountains does not slide nor rustle like Prairie rivers, but brawls across bars of blue pebbles, and a greenish tinge in its water hints of the snows.

What I saw of Calgary was crowded into one lively half-hour (motors were invented to run about new cities).  What I heard I picked up, oddly enough, weeks later, from a young Dane in the North Sea.  He was qualmish, but his Saga of triumph upheld him.

’Three years ago I come to Canada by steerage—­third class. And I have the language to learn.  Look at me!  I have now my own dairy business, in Calgary, and—­look at me!—­my own half section, that is, three hundred and twenty acres.  All my land which is mine!  And now I come home, first class, for Christmas here in Denmark, and I shall take out back with me, some friends of mine which are farmers, to farm on those irrigated lands near by Calgary.  Oh, I tell you there is nothing wrong with Canada for a man which works.’

‘And will your friends go?’ I inquired.

’You bet they will.  It is all arranged already.  I bet they get ready to go now already; and in three years they will come back for Christmas here in Denmark, first class like me.’

‘Then you think Calgary is going ahead?’

’You bet!  We are only at the beginning of things.  Look at me!  Chickens?  I raise chickens also in Calgary,’ etc., etc.

After all this pageant of unrelieved material prosperity, it was a rest to get to the stillness of the big foothills, though they, too, had been in-spanned for the work of civilisation.  The timber off their sides was ducking and pitch-poling down their swift streams, to be sawn into house-stuff for all the world.  The woodwork of a purely English villa may come from as many Imperial sources as its owner’s income.

The train crept, whistling to keep its heart up, through the winding gateways of the hills, till it presented itself, very humbly, before the true mountains, the not so Little Brothers to the Himalayas.  Mountains of the pine-cloaked, snow-capped breed are unchristian things.

Men mine into the flanks of some of them, and trust to modern science to pull them through.  Not long ago, a mountain kneeled on a little mining village as an angry elephant kneels; but it did not get up again, and the half of that camp was no more seen on earth.  The other half still stands—­uninhabited.  The ‘heathen in his blindness’ would have made arrangements with the Genius of the Place before he ever drove a pick there.  ’As a learned