ched streams
resolve themselves into two great water systems; through hundreds of
miles these two rivers pursue their parallel courses, now approaching,
now opening out from each other. Suddenly, the southern river bends
towards the north, and at a point some 600 miles from the mountains pours
its volume of water into the northern channel. Then the united river
rolls in vast majestic curves steadily towards the north-east, turns
once more towards the south, opens out into a great reed covered marsh,
sweeps on into a large cedar-lined lake, and finally, rolling over a
rocky ledge, casts its waters into the northern end of the great Lake
Winnipeg, fully 1300 miles from the glacier cradle where it took its
birth. This river, which has along it every diversity of hill and vale,
meadow-land and forest, treeless plain and fertile hill-side, is called
by the wild tribes who dwell-along its glorious shores the
Kissaskatchewan, or Rapid-flowing River. But this Kissaskatchewan is not
the only river which waters the great central region lying between Red
River and the Rocky Mountains. The Assineboine or Stony River drains the
rolling prairie lands 500 miles west from Red River, and many a smaller
stream and rushing, bubbling brook carries into its devious channel the
waters of that vast country which lies between the American boundary-line
and the pine woods of the lower Saskatchewan.

So much for the rivers; and now for the land through which they flow. How
shall we picture it? How shall we tell the story of that great,
boundless, solitary waste of verdure?

The old, old maps which the navigators of the sixteenth century framed
from the discoveries of Cabot and Cartier, of Varrazanno and Hudson,
played strange pranks with the geography of the New World. The
coast-line, with the estuaries of large rivers, was tolerably accurate;
but the centre of America was represented as a vast inland sea whose
shores stretched far into the Polar North; a sea through which lay the
much-coveted passage to the long sought treasures of the old realms of
Cathay. Well, the geographers of that period erred only in the
description of ocean which they placed in the central continent, for an
ocean there is, and an ocean through which men seek the treasures of
Cathay, even in our own times. But the ocean is one of grass, and the
shores are the crests of mountain ranges, and the dark pine forests of
sub-Arctic regions. The great ocean itself does not pres