Newfoundland to Cochin China. Ethel Gwendoline Vincent

company. They first explored the country, owned it, and kept up friendly relations with the Indians. It was one of those great trading monopolies, owned by merchants, and which have done so much for the wealth and commerce of England. The Hudson Bay Company has accomplished in a minor degree for Canada, what the East India Company did for India. This shop may truly be called the Army and Navy stores of the West, for it contains everything from brocades and Paris mantles (which are bought by the squaws) furs, carpets, groceries, to Indian blankets, pipes and bead work. In this bead work the blending of colours is exquisite. At the last Louis Riel rebellion, the wholesale department outfitted and provisioned at twenty-four hours' notice, 600 soldiers for thirty days.

      We then visited the tennis club. I am impressed with the immense utility of this popular game, which, if useful in England, performs a large social duty in all Canadian towns. It forms a mild daily excitement, and a meeting place for all, and is especially useful in a country where, with the impossibility of obtaining servants, entertaining is a difficult matter.

      Canon O'Meara took us one morning to the outskirts of the city to see the cathedral. Lying out in the country and built of wood, it resembles a simple village church. The surrounding cemetery is full of handsome monuments, and here lie many victims of the boom. The most interesting monument is the granite sarcophagus, engraved with seven names, surrounded by laurel wreaths of the victims of the last rebellion. Their remains were brought back here to be buried, with an impressive public funeral.

      We visited the Bishop of Rupert's Land in his adjoining house. He is Metropolitan of eight bishoprics, and has an enormous diocese reaching into the unexplored regions of the Mackenzie River. He has organized a college on the model of an English University, and which confers degrees.

      Studying the working of the Church in Canada, one recognizes some arguments in favour of Disestablishment. In Canada there is no State endowment, and the clergy are supported by voluntary contributions. This money comes partly from pew rents, and is greatly assisted by the envelope system. By this method the parishioner covenants to give a certain sum a year for the maintenance of his church, by fixed weekly Sunday instalments. He is furnished with fifty-two envelopes, on which his name is printed, and these contributions are entered in a book. There appears to be no difficulty in raising funds by these means, particularly if the clergyman is popular. If he is unpopular, or his doctrines unacceptable or extreme, he suffers by the falling off of his income. This system, moreover, has the advantage of giving every man an interest in his church. A clergyman observed that several members of his congregation appeared at church for the first time on the establishment of this envelope system. "Oh, yes," they said, in response to his remark, "we have got some stock in this concern now."

      It works particularly smoothly where the bishop, adapting himself to the needs of a new country, admits the principle that those who pay must choose. They require, however, a Clergy Discipline Act as much as we do.

      Mr. Robinson took us in the afternoon for a drive across the prairie to Sir Donald Smith's model farm at Silver Heights, where there are three splendid specimens of the now extinct buffalo, some of the few left of those vast herds that used to roam the prairie. The farm takes its name from the adjoining wood of silver poplar trees.

      C. visited the venerable French Archbishop Taché. He told him that he came out forty-six years ago, and that it took him then sixty-two days to travel from Montreal, what he can now perform in sixty-two hours. He showed the inkstand from which his uncle, the Premier of Quebec, Sir Etienne Taché, signed the Confederation Act of Canada.

      Thursday, August 27th.—Before leaving Winnipeg Major Heward gave us an early inspection at the barracks of the Mounted Infantry. They are smart and well-mounted on brancho horses, reared in the west. We also inspected the chief of the three fire stations. They have a chemical steamer. In this the water is mixed with carbolic acid gas. Fire being supported by oxygen, the carbolic gas, when thrown on it, extinguishes the supply of oxygen, and with it the fire. The fire bell, in sounding, throws open the stable door and the horses trot out by themselves and place their necks under the suspended collar, which descends and is fastened by a patent bolt.

      The west-bound trains all stop at Winnipeg for five hours to allow time for the colonists to visit the Railway and Dominion Land Offices, and to obtain information respecting selections of lands. The land in the North-West Provinces has now been surveyed and allotted thus for twenty-four miles each side of the line. In a township of thirty-six sections of 640 acres, or one square mile to each section, the Dominion retains roughly one half, whilst the C.P.R. retains the other. There are two sections reserved for school purposes, that the value of the land may make the schools free and self-supporting, two sections for the Hudson Bay Company, and the Canada North-West Land Company have bought others. The diagram on page 53 will show the division of sections.

      The station was crowded with large parties of emigrants, as many settlers leave their families here, whilst choosing their sections further west. There are bundles of bedding, tin cooking utensils, with bird cages and babies in promiscuous heaps.

      As we pass out of the station we see the enormous plant and rolling stock of the C.P.R., which has here its half-way depot between Montreal and Vancouver. They have twenty miles of sidings, which are now full of plant waiting to be pressed forward, to bring down the harvest to the coast.

      TOWNSHIP DIAGRAM.

      The above diagram shows the manner in which the country is surveyed. It represents a township—that is, a tract of land six miles square, containing 36 sections of one mile square each. These sections are subdivided into quarter sections of 160 acres each.

      We are out on the prairie at once, on that great billowy sea of brown and yellow grass; monotonous it is, and yet pleasing in its quiet, rich, monotones of colour. The virgin soil is of rich black loam. The belt of unsettled land round Winnipeg is caused by the land being held by speculators, but after that we pass many pleasant farms, clustering more thickly around Portage le Prairie, a rising town. We pass a freight train entirely composed of refrigerator cars, containing that bright pink salmon from British Columbia, which is a luxury in the east and a drug in the west. The engine bears a trophy of a sheaf of corn, to show that the harvest in the west has already begun.

      Out of the whole year we could not have chosen a more favourable moment for visiting the North-West, as the harvest is in full swing. We are at this moment passing through a sea of golden grain, acre after acre extending in an unbroken line to the horizon. Indeed we are told that these wheat fields form a continuous belt some forty miles deep on either side of the railway.

      It would be difficult for anyone living even in the east of Canada, to realize the enormous interest shown in the crops and weather out here. For months and weeks beforehand it forms a general topic of conversation, but, as August closes in, it becomes the one and all absorbing concern. The newspapers are scanned for the daily weather reports. Warnings are telegraphed broadcast through the land. As Professor Goldwin Smith says, in his book "Canada and the Canadian Question," "Just before the harvest the weather is no commonplace topic, and a deep anxiety broods over the land."

      The interests at stake are enormous, involving as they do the question to many of prosperity or ruin. One cold night, or one touch of frost may destroy the labour of a year. This year the promise is exceptional, and the prospect was bright until a week ago. Then there were ominous whispers of frost. These early and late frosts are the scourge of the farmer, and the lateness of the harvest, owing to an exceptionally cold summer, increases the anxiety. Day by day, hour by hour, the temperature is discussed with earnestness, increasing with intensity as evening approaches. The other night there were people in Winnipeg going up and down Main Street all night and striking matches to look at the thermometer placed there. The interest to all was so vital that they could not rest. There are warnings published in bulletins to farmers, to light smudge fires to keep the frost from the wheat. These fires of stubble, lighted to the north or north-west of the fields, by raising the temperature two or three degrees, keep off the frost, and the dread of smutted wheat. We see these smudge fires smouldering as we pass along.

      The virgin soil will yield as much