The snow began to fall in great flakes, and the boisterous wind drove them violently into the faces of the sightseers as they hurried from the church.  None of them saw the horse on the far side of the road; the snow was blinding.

As he heard their voices die away in the distance, Dr. Chalmers’ head drooped till it rested on the animal’s mane.  Patiently the beast whisked away the snow and tried to hide its head from the vicious wind.

It was growing rapidly dark, but he did not notice it:  he was thinking of the fight he had made for her life, and of the love that had come to him in the summer days when health came back to her to make amends.

    “To prevail in the cause that is dearer than life!”

The mocking refrain seemed to have been shouted into his ears; he started as though he had been struck, seized the reins, and dashed into the gathering storm.

* * * * *

A Perilous Encounter.

It is not because I am unduly sensitive of my altered appearance that I have told so few the story of the ugly scar that disfigures my face, but on account of the horror that I yet experience when recalling the terrible incidents that led to my receiving it.  How many lives were saved by that wound I shall never know.

The great Canadian Pacific Railway, which to-day connects the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific, was in the year 1882 built only about two hundred miles west of Winnipeg, leaving a huge gap of several hundred miles of untouched prairie before one of the world’s wonders, the famed Rocky Mountains of British Columbia, was reached.

Such was the rapidity with which the rails were laid and telegraph offices erected, that when winter set in, fifty telegraph operators were needed to take charge of the empty stations.

The management found it hard to induce men to go out and bury themselves for the winter in the vast prairie, which was only then being opened up.  To-day, men are only too happy to make homes in this wonderful country, which has very aptly been termed the future granary of the world.

Money is a loadstone that few men can resist, and when I heard that $80 a month was being paid out there for operators, I resigned my position in Montreal, and with $20 and a pass in my pocket started for Manitoba.

On reaching Winnipeg, I was at once sent out to Elkhorn, a bit of a station 150 miles farther west.  When I took charge, in November, four inches of snow already hid the earth, which did not see the sun again till March.

Two passenger trains a day, and an occasional construction train, formed the only break in the monotonous life which I led.  It was a dreadfully solitary existence.  I was alone in the station, and as December began to wane, and the dread blizzards commenced their wild revelry, heaping the snow into such huge mounds on the tracks that the trains were delayed for days, I got as homesick and nervous as a girl of fourteen instead of a young man of twenty.