e sea level. It is the
birth-place of waters which seek in four mighty streams the four distant
oceans--the Polar Sea, the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific.

A few miles north-west of Edmonton a settlement composed exclusively of
French half-breeds is situated on the shores of a rather extensive lake
which bears the name of the Grand Lac, or St. Albert. This settlement is
presided over by a mission of French Roman Catholic clergymen of the
order of Oblates, headed by a bishop of the same order and nationality.
It is a curious contrast to find in this distant and strange land men of
culture and high mental excellence devoting their lives to the task of
civilizing the wild Indians of the forest and the prairie--going far in
advance of the settler, whose advent they have but too much cause to
dread. I care not what may be the form of belief which the on-looker may
hold--whether it be in unison or in antagonism with that faith preached
by these men; but he is only a poor semblance of a man who can behold
such a sight through the narrow glass of sectarian feeling, holding'
opinions foreign to his own. He who has travelled through the vast
colonial empire of Britain--that empire which covers one third of the
entire habitable surface of the globe and probably half of the lone lands
of the world must often have met with men dwelling in the midst of wild,
savage peoples whom they tended with a strange and mother-like devotion.
If you asked who was this stranger who dwelt thus among wild men in these
Lone places, you were told he was the French missionary; and if you
sought him in his lonely hut, you found ever the same surroundings, the
same simple evidences of a faith which seemed more than human. I do not
speak from hearsay or book-knowledge. I have myself witnessed the scenes
I now try to recall. And it has ever been the same, East and West, far in
advance of trader or merchant, of sailor or soldier, has gone this
dark-haired, fragile man, whose earliest memories are thick with sunny
scenes by bank of Loire or vine-clad slope of Rhone or Garonne, and whose
vision in this life, at least, is never destined to rest again upon these
oft-remembered places. Glancing through a pamphlet one day at Edmonton, a
pamphlet which recorded the progress of a Canadian Wesleyan Missionary
Society, I read the following extract from the letter of a Western
missionary:--"These representatives of the Man of Sin, these priests, are
hard