were cruelly hunted and killed, but are now protected and
encouraged. Now the Government is doing its best to save the remnant.

The amount of land yet wholly untrodden in the heart of these great
mountains is difficult to realise; even the Indians only pass through
some of it, and no white man's foot has ever touched more than a tithe.
Grizzly bears, cinnamon bears, deer, wild sheep, and goats live still in
these fastnesses, quite undisturbed by the little line that threads
through from sea to sea.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER XXXI

ON A CATTLE RANCH

Do you remember your first sight of the sea? I've not forgotten mine,
though it must have been many years before yours. I suppose I wasn't
more than four, and kindly patronising elder brothers and sisters had
tried to describe it to me beforehand, but the most I pictured was a
very, very big pond, with water as flat and uninteresting as that of
most ponds. No one can have any real notion of the sea before seeing it;
and it is the same with the prairie. I have often imagined it, but now
that we are actually on it, driving over it, I find that all my
mind-pictures are lifeless compared with the reality. It gives one a
feeling of freedom, as if one had been living always in rooms and
suddenly got out. It is not flat like a table, but full of gentle curves
and sweeps, as if it were always just going to reveal something unknown,
and yet it reaches on for ever on all sides. It makes us feel quite
insignificant as our conveyance crawls along the centre of a gigantic
circle which appears to move with us. But the thing which is most
surprising is the beauty of it. The grass is growing freely and is very
fresh, and mingled with it, like poppies and cornflowers in a
wheatfield, are innumerable flowers, red and blue and yellow, shining
like jewels in the brilliant sunlight--some are like sunflowers, and
others, growing singly, are tall red lilies. There are clumps of trees,
too, here and there, little round islands of them, bluffs, they are
called. We have left the mountains now and descended into the great
plains once only inhabited by wild tribes of the Redskins and mighty
herds of buffalo, but now for the most part taken up by white men for
grazing-ground.

[Illustration: A LEAN SUNBURNT MAN.]

When our engine ran into Calgary station, with a great clanging of the
big bell, we found a sunburnt lean young man of twenty or so, in the
shady hat, blue shirt, breeches, and