ld who said, "I always feel more respect for a boy than
for a man. Who knows what possibilities may be buttoned up under that
ragged jacket?" It doesn't take long for the foreigners to make good. A
young Icelander, Skuli Johnson, of all the thousands of Winnipeg
students, this year captured the coveted honor of the academic
world--the Rhodes scholarship.

We slip out of Winnipeg as the bells of St. Boniface ring the vespers
from their turrets twain. Whittier, who never saw this quaint cathedral,
has immortalized it in verse. The story is one of those bits of
forgotten history so hard to get hold of in a day when Winnipeg measures
its every thought in bushels and bullion.

The settlers who came to Selkirk on the outskirts of present Winnipeg
just a hundred years ago were sturdy Scots, weaned on the Psalms of
David and the Shorter Catechism. There were English missionaries here
and priests of the Church of Rome, but the disciples of John Knox wanted
some one to expound Predestination to them. A religious ceremony
performed by any man who was not a Presbyterian seemed scarcely binding.
One old lady, speaking of the nuptials of her daughter, said, "I wudna
have Janet marrit by the bishop. She maun wait till we can have a
properly-ordained meenister." And he was coming. Even now he was
floating in on the Red River with Indian and half-breed boatmen, having
reached St. Paul from Scotland via the Atlantic seaboard some weeks
before.

When a Scot and an Indian get in a boat together, to use a Will Carleton
phrase, "they do not teem with conversational grace." Straight from
Aberdeen, the young Dominee coming into Winnipeg little dreamed that the
Church of Rome had established its Mission on the Red River decades ago.
In fact, he knew as little about Canada as he did about Timbuctoo, and
in his simplicity thought himself "the first that ever burst into that
silent sea." When the evening breeze brought to his ears a muffled
sound, he was in doubt how to place it.

"Is it the clang of wild-geese?
Is it the Indian's yell,
That lends to the voice of the North-wind
The tones of a far-off bell?"

The Indian boatmen _said_ nothing, but thought deep, like the Irishman's
parrot.

"The voyageur smiles as he listens
To the sound that grows apace;
Well he knows the vesper ringing
Of the bells of St. Boniface."

Once the young Scot had reached his flock, he wrote back to a friend in
the States telling how he came across on