The mill of destiny goes slowly round, and Lord Selkirk and his friends are triumphant.  He purchases an enormous tract of land, 116,000 square miles, one-half in what is now the Province of Manitoba, the other at present included in the States of Minnesota and North Dakota, on the south side of the boundary line between Canada and the United States.  The Nor’-Westers are frantic; but the fates are against them.  The duel has begun!  Who will win?  Cunning and misrepresentation are to be employed to check the success of the Colony, and also local opposition on the other side of the Atlantic, should the scheme ever come to anything.  At present their hope is that it may fall to pieces of its own weight.

Lord Selkirk’s scheme is dazzling almost beyond belief.  A territory is his, purchased out and out, from the Hudson’s Bay Company, about four times the area of Scotland, his native land, and the greater part of it fertile, with the finest natural soil in the world, waiting for the farmer to give a return in a single year after his arrival.  A territory, not possessed by a foreign people, but under the British flag!  A country yet to be the home of millions!  It is worth living to be able to plant such a tree, which will shelter and bless future generations of mankind.  Financial loss he might have; but he would have fame as his reward.

CHAPTER III.

“Across the stormy sea.”

Oh dreadful war!  It is not only in the deadly horror of battle, and in the pain and anguish of men strong and hearty, done to death by human hands.  It is not only in the rotting heap of horses and men, torn to pieces by bullets and shell, and thrust together within huge pits in one red burial blent.  It is not only in the helpless widow and her brood of dazed and desolate children weeping over the news that comes from the battlefield, that war become so hideous.  It is always, as it was in the time of the Europe-shadowing Napoleon when for twenty years the wheels of industry in Britain were stopped.  It is always the derangement of business, the increased price of food for the poor, the decay of trade, the cutting off of supplies, and the stopping of works of improvement that brings conditions which make poverty so terrible.  Rags!  A bed of straw; a crust of bread; the shattered roof; the naked floor; a deal table; a broken chair!  A writer whose boyhood saw the terror, and want, and despair of the last decade of the Napoleonic War, puts into the mouth of the victim of poverty this terrible wail: 

“But why do I talk of death? 
  That phantom of grizzly bone;
 I hardly fear his terrible shape
  It seems so like my own;
 It seems so like my own,
  Because of the fasts I keep;
 Oh God, that bread should be so dear
  And flesh and blood so cheap!”