stretched out ungarnered wheat in the ear as far as sight could reach,
and the place itself and the neighbouring town of Manitou on the other
side of the Sagalac River were like islands washed by a topaz sea.

Standing upon the Rise, lost in the prospect, was an old, white-haired
man in the cassock of a priest, with grey beard reaching nearly to the
waist.

For long he surveyed the scene, and his eyes had a rapt look.

At last he spoke aloud:

"There shall be an heap of corn in the earth, high upon the hills;
his fruit shall shake like Libanus, and shall be green in the city
like grass upon the earth."

A smile came to his lips--a rare, benevolent smile. He had seen this
expanse of teeming life when it was thought to be an alkali desert, fit
only to be invaded by the Blackfeet and the Cree and the Blood Indians
on a foray for food and furs. Here he had come fifty years before, and
had gone West and North into the mountains in the Summer season, when
the land was tremulous with light and vibrating to the hoofs of herds of
buffalo as they stampeded from the hunters; and also in the Winter time,
when frost was master and blizzard and drift its malignant servants.

Even yet his work was not done. In the town of Manitou he still said
mass now and then, and heard the sorrows and sins of men and women, and
gave them "ghostly comfort," while priests younger than himself took the
burden of parish-work from his shoulders.

For a lifetime he had laboured among the Indians and the few whites and
squaw-men and half-breeds, with neither settlement nor progress. Then,
all at once, the railway; and people coming from all the world,
and cities springing up! Now once more he was living the life of
civilization, exchanging raw flesh of fish and animals and a meal of
tallow or pemmican for the wheaten loaf; the Indian tepee for the warm
house with the mansard roof; the crude mass beneath the trees for the
refinements of a chancel and an altar covered with lace and white linen.

A flock of geese went honking over his head. His eyes smiled in memory
of the countless times he had watched such flights, had seen thousands
of wild ducks hurrying down a valley, had watched a family of herons
stretching away to some lonely water-home. And then another sound
greeted his ear. It was shrill, sharp and insistent. A great serpent was
stealing out of the East and moving down upon Lebanon. It gave out puffs
of smoke from its ungainly hea