they are all good pay,” the implement-man says.  Looking at the red ploughs, we see in each a new chapter to be written in Canada’s history.  The page of the book is the prairie, as yet inviolate, and running out into flowers to the skyline.  The tools to do the writing are these ploughs and mowers and threshers, the stout arms of men and of faith-possessed women.  It is all new and splendid and hopeful and formative!

We get in Winnipeg another picture, one that will remain with us till we reach the last Great Divide.  At the Winnipeg General Hospital, Dr. D.A.  Stewart says to us, “Come, I want to show you a brave chap, one who has fallen by the way.”  We find this man, Alvin Carlton, stretched on a cot.  “Tell him that you are going into the land of fur,” whispers the doctor, “he has been a trapper all his life.”

Crossing soft ice on the Lake of the Woods, Carlton broke through, and his snow-shoes pinned him fast.  When dragged out he had suffered so with the intense cold that he became partially paralysed and was sent here to the hospital.  Hard luck?  Yes, but the misfortune was tempered with mercy.  Within these walls Carlton met a doctor full of the mellow juice of life,—­a doctor with a man’s brain, the sympathy of a woman, and the heart of a little child.  The trapper, as we are introduced to him, has one leg and both hands paralysed, with just a perceptible sense of motion remaining in the other leg.  His vocal cords are so affected that the sounds he makes are to us absolutely unintelligible, more like the mumblings of an animal than the speech of a man.  Between patient and doctor, a third man entered the drama,—­Mr. Grey, a convalescent.  Appointed special nurse to the trapper, Grey studied him as a mother studies her deficient child, and now was able, to our unceasing marvel, to translate these sad mouthings of Carlton into human speech.

Who is this patient?  A man without friends or influence, not attractive in appearance, more than distressing to listen to,—­just one more worker thrown off from the gear of the rapidly-turning wheel of life.  The consulting doctors agreed that no skill could perform a cure, could not even arrest the creeping death.  Winnipeg is big and busy, and no corner of it more crowded than the General Hospital, no corps more overworked.  Dr. Stewart had two men’s work to do.  He worked all day and was busy well into the night.  A doctor’s natural tendency is to see in each man that he ministers to merely “a case,” a manifestation of some disease to be watched and tabulated and ticked off into percentages.  But in the Stewart-Carlton-Grey combination, Fate had thrown together three young men in whom the human part, the man element, loomed large.

The doctor guessed that under that brave front the heart of the trapper was eating itself out for the cry of the moose, the smell of wood-smoke by twilight.  We are happiest when we create.  So he said to Carlton, “Did you ever write a story?” The head shook answer.  “Well, why don’t you try?  You must know a lot, old chap, about out-door things, that nobody else knows.  Think some of it out, and then dictate it to Grey here.”