d the
greatest portion. The feverish activity and energy which were fast
changing the prairie into a populous place seemed directed to one end--
the getting of wealth. Wealth must be gotten by fair means or foul, and
it must be gotten suddenly. There was no respite, no repose. One must
go onward or be pushed aside, or be trodden under foot. Fortune was
daily tempted, and the daily result was success, or utter failure, till
a new chance could be grasped at.

"Honest labour! Patient toil!" Allan wondered within himself if the
words had ever reached the inward sense of these eager, anxious men,
jostling each other in their never-ceasing struggle.

Allan watched, and wondered, and mused, trying to understand, and to
make himself charitable over the evil, by calling it a national one, and
telling himself that these men of the new world were not to be judged by
old laws, or measured by old standards. But there were among the
swiftest runners of the race for gold men from all lands, men whose
boyish feet had wandered over English meadows, or trod the heather on
Scottish hills. Men whose fathers had spent their lives content in
mountain sheilings, with no wish beyond their flocks and their native
glens; humble artisans, smiths, and masons, who had passed in their own
country for honest, patient, God-fearing men, grew as eager, as
unscrupulous, as swift as the fleetest in the race. The very diggers of
ditches, and breakers of stone on the highway, the hewers of wood and
drawers of water; took with discontent that it was no more their daily
wages, doubled or tripled to them, since they set foot on the soil of
the new world.

That there might be another sort of life in the midst of this turmoil,
he did not consider. He never could associate the idea of home or
comfort with those dingy brick structures, springing up in a day at
every corner. He could not fancy those hard voices growing soft in the
utterance of loving words, or those thin, compressed lips gladly meeting
the smiling mouth of a little child. Home! Why, all the world seemed
at home in those vast hotels; the men and women greeting each other
coldly, in these great parlours, seemed to have no wants that a black
man, coming at the sound of a bell, might not easily supply. Even the
children seemed at ease and self-possessed in the midst of the crowd.
They troubled no one with noisy play or merry prattle, but sat on chairs
with their elders, listening to,