He turned some pages laboriously, yet not vaguely.  His eyes were dim and his hands palsied, but he knew what he was looking for.  He found it at last, and sat pondering it—­the paragraph which, when he had hit upon it by chance in the same place twenty-four hours earlier, had changed the whole current of his thoughts.

“Donaldminster, Sask., May 6th.—­We are delighted to hear from this prosperous and go-ahead town that, with regard to the vacant seat the Liberals of the city have secured as a candidate Mr. George Anderson, who achieved such an important success last year for the C.P.R. by his settlement on their behalf of the dangerous strike which had arisen in the Rocky Mountains section of the line, and which threatened not only to affect all the construction camps in the district but to spread to the railway workers proper and to the whole Winnipeg section.  Mr. Anderson seems to have a remarkable hold on the railway men, and he is besides a speaker of great force.  He is said to have addressed twenty-three meetings, and to have scarcely eaten or slept for a fortnight.  He was shrewd and fair in negotiation, as well as eloquent in speech.  The result was an amicable settlement, satisfactory to all parties.  And the farmers of the West owe Mr. Anderson a good deal.  So does the C.P.R.  For if the strike had broken out last October, just as the movement of the fall crops eastward was at its height, the farmers and the railway, and Canada in general would have been at its mercy.  We wish Mr. Anderson a prosperous election (it is said, indeed, that he is not to be opposed) and every success in his political career.  He is, we believe, Canadian born—­sprung from a farm in Manitoba—­so that he has grown up with the Northwest, and shares all its hopes and ambitions.”

The old man, with both elbows on the table, crouched over the newspaper, incoherent pictures of the past coursing through his mind, which was still dazed and stupid from the drink of the night before.

Meanwhile, the special train sped along the noble Red River and out into the country.  All over the prairie the wheat was up in a smooth green carpet, broken here and there by the fields of timothy and clover, or the patches of summer fallow, or the white homestead buildings.  The June sun shone down upon the teeming earth, and a mirage, born of sun and moisture, spread along the edge of the horizon, so that Elizabeth, the lake-lover, could only imagine in her bewilderment that Lake Winnipeg or Lake Manitoba had come dancing south and east to meet her, so clearly did the houses and trees, far away behind them, and on either side, seem to be standing at the edge of blue water, in which the white clouds overhead were mirrored, and reed-beds stretched along the shore.  But as the train receded, the mirage followed them; the dream-water lapped up the trees and the fields, and even the line they had just passed over seemed to be standing in water.