the appearance of a long suburban village—­ such as you might see near our eastern sea-board, or such as you find exhibited in pictures of English country villages, with the resemblance rendered more striking by the spires of several large churches peeping above the foliage of the trees in the distance, whitewashed school-houses glistening here and there amidst sunlight and green; gentlemen’s houses of pretentious dimensions and grassy lawns and elaborate fencing, the seats of retired officers of the Hudson’s Bay Company occasionally interspersed; here an English bishop’s parsonage, with a boarding or high school near by; and over there a Catholic bishop’s massive cathedral, with a convent of Sisters of Charity attached; whilst the two large stone forts, at which reside the officers of the Hudson’s Bay Company, or of the colony once called Upper Fort Garry, and situated at the mouth of the Assinniboin, and the other termini the Lower Fort Garry, which is twenty miles farther down the river, helped to give additional picturesqueness to the scene.  I had almost forgotten to mention what is, after all, the most prominent and peculiar feature of that singular landscape, singular from its location—­ and that is the numerous wind-mills, nearly twenty in all, which on every point of land made by the turns and bends in the river, stretched out their huge sails athwart the horizon, and seemingly looked defiance at us as invading strangers, that were from a land where steam or water mills monopolize their avocation of flour making.  One morning as we passed down the principal high road, on our way to Lower Fort Garry, the wind, after a protracted calm, began to blow a little; when presto! each mill veered around its sails to catch the propitious breeze, and as the sails began to revolve, it was curious to observe the numerous carts that shot out from nearly every farm-house, and hurried along the road to these mills, to get ground their grists of spring wheat, with which they were respectively loaded.

“Another incident during the same trip that struck us oddly, was seeing two ladies driving by themselves a fine horse hitched to a buggy of modern fashion, just as much at home apparently as if they were driving through the streets of St. Paul, or St. Anthony, or Minneapolis, instead of upon that remote highway towards the North Pole; but this was not a whit more novel than to hear the pianoforte, and played, too, with both taste and skill.  While another ‘lion’ of those parts that met our view was a topsail schooner lying in the river at the lower fort, which made occasional trips into Great Lake Winnepeg of the North, a hundred miles below.