On the benches of one school-room in Edmonton I found children who had been born in Canada, the United States, England, Scotland, Russia, New Zealand, Poland, Switzerland, Australia, and Austro-Hungary.  They were all singing “The Maple Leaf Forever.”  It is the lessons these children are to learn in that little red school-house which will determine the future of Western Canada, and not the yearly tale of forty-bushel wheat.  In the past, nations out of their very fatness have decayed.  Many signs are full of hope.  Last winter Mrs. Ray travelled alone with dog-sled all the way from Hudson Bay to Winnipeg to place her children in school.  Her husband is a fur-trader and could not leave his post.  At all hazards the bairns must be educated, so the brave mother journeyed out with them!

May I close with a purely personal note?  At the end of a summer which had showered us with kindness, I was to hear from the lips of a Roman priest in St. Boniface the most delightful tribute I have had in my life.  We had gone across the river to see the holy relics and skulls, the result of the La Verendrye research carried on by this clergy in the Lake of the Woods country.  I was anxious to get the story of the recovery of these historic remains and also to secure photographs.  But the Father was obdurate, for he thought his Bishop might not approve.  We turned to go downstairs from the third story of the seminary.  Looking in at an open door, my eye was caught by the familiar wording of a blackboard problem.  “If 16 men and 4 boys working 4 hours a day dig a trench 82 yards long——.”  And I halted, as the one-time circus-horse stops when he hears the drum of a passing band.

“You are interested?” queried the Father.

“Yes,” I acknowledged, “I once taught school.”

He, still in the trammels, looked the enquiry he did not utter.

“I taught school for twenty-five years,” I admitted.

We walked on down the stairs to the next landing in silence, when he turned to me with, “And you taught school—­for twen-ty five years?”

I nodded my head, and we went on.  At the next landing the remark was repeated.  At the foot of the stairs he excused himself and came back with the photographs which he presented to me with an Old World courtesy and dignity.  Grasping my hand in farewell, once more the man of God wondered, “And for twen-ty five years you taught school.  And you remain so—­” He hesitated for the word, and I wondered what it would be.  At last it came,—­the tribute of one who expected to teach school all his life to one who had put in a quarter of a century at the work and still survived,—­“You have taught school for twen-ty five years, and you remain so glad!”

And this is the keynote of what the summer has left with us.  As Canadians, looking at this Western Canada which has arrived and thinking of the lands of Canada’s fertile Northland far beyond, for the future we are full of optimism, and of the present we are glad.