What Cook & Son failed to supply, the Hudson’s Bay Company in Winnipeg furnished.  This concern has been foster-mother to Canada’s Northland for two hundred and thirty-nine years.  Its foundation reaches back to when the Second Charles ruled in England,—­an age when men said not “How cheap?” but “How good?”, not “How easy?” but “How well?” The Hudson’s Bay Company is to-day the Cook’s Tourist Company of the North, the Coutts’ Banking concern, and the freshwater Lloyd’s.  No man or woman can travel with any degree of comfort throughout Northwest America except under the kindly aegis of the Old Company.  They plan your journey for you, give you introductions to their factors at the different posts, and sell you an outfit guiltless of the earmarks of the tenderfoot.  Moreover, they will furnish you with a letter of credit which can be transmuted into bacon and beans and blankets, sturgeon-head boats, guides’ services, and succulent sow-belly, at any point between Fort Chimo on Ungava Bay and Hudson’s Hope-on-the-Peace, between Winnipeg-on-the-Red and that point in the Arctic where the seagull whistles over the whaling-ships at Herschel.

For a railroad station, the wall-notices in the baggage room of the Canadian Northern at Winnipeg are unique.  Evidently inspired for the benefit of employes, they give the incoming traveller a surprise.  Here they are as we copied them down: 

Let all things be done decently and in order.
    1 Cor. xiv, 40.

Be punctual, be regular, be clean. 
Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. 
Be obliging and kind one to another. 
Let no angry word be heard among you
Be not fond of change. (Sic.)
Be clothed with humility, not finery. 
Take all things by the smooth handle. 
Be civil to all, but familiar with few.

As we smile over this Canadian substitute for the American,—­

“Hang on to your hand-baggage.  Don’t let
go your overcoat.  Thieves are around,”

the baggage-master with a strong Scottish accent says over our shoulders, “Guid maxims, and we live up t’ them!”

A big Irish policeman is talking to a traveller who has stepped off a transcontinental train, and who asks with a drawl, “What makes Winnipeg?” Scraping a lump of mud from his boot-heel, the Bobby holds it out.  “This is the sordid dhross and filthy lucre which keeps our nineteen chartered banks and their one and twenty suburban branches going.  Just beyant is one hundred million acres of it, and the dhirty stuff grows forty bushels of wheat to the acre.  Don’t be like the remittance man from England, sorr,” with a quizzical look at the checked suit of his interlocutor, “shure they turn the bottom of their trowsies up so high that divil of the dhross sticks to them!” As Mulcahey winks the other eye, we drift out into this “Buckle of the Wheat-Belt.”

What has the policeman’s hard wheat done for Winnipeg?  Well, it gave her a building expansion, a year ago, greater than that of any other city of her population in America.  One year has seen in Western Canada an increase in crop area under the one cereal of winter wheat of over one hundred and fifty per cent, a development absolutely unique in the world’s history.