st up the Thompson and the
lakes there is navigation to Spallamacheen. Once the owners of the
_Peerless_ ran her from Savona down to Cook's Ferry, just in order to
see if it could be done. The down-stream trip was done in three hours,
but it took three weeks to get her back again, and then her progress had
to be aided with ropes from the shore; so it was not deemed advisable to
make the trip regularly.

As for the river in the main Fraser canyon, it is nothing more nor less
than a perfect hell of waters; and though Mr Onderdonk, who had the
lower British Columbia contract for the Canadian Pacific Railroad, built
a boat to run on it, the first time the _Skuzzy_ let go of the bank she
ran ashore. She was taken to pieces and rebuilt on the lakes. The
railroad people wanted her at first on the lower river, and asked a Mr
Moore, who is well known as a daring steamboatman, to take her down. He
said he would undertake it, but demanded so high a fee, including a
thousand dollars for his wife if he was drowned, that his offer was
refused. Yet it was well worth almost any money, for it would have been
a very hazardous undertaking--as bad as, or even worse than, the _Maid
of the Mist_ going through the rapids below Niagara.

A TALK WITH KRUGER

It was a warm day in the end of September 1898 when I put my foot in
Pretoria. There was an air of lassitude about the town. President Steyn,
of the Orange Free State, had been and gone, and the triumphal arch
still cried "Wilkom" across Church Square. The two Boer States had
ratified their secret understanding, and many Boers looked on the arch
as a prophecy of victory. Perhaps by now those who were accustomed to
meet in the Raadsaal close by are not so sure that heaven-enlightened
wisdom brought about the compact. As for myself, I thought little enough
of the matter then, for Pretoria seemed curiously familiar to me, though
I had never been there, and had never so much as seen a photograph of it
until I saw one in Johannesburg. For some time I could not understand
why it seemed familiar. It is true that it had some resemblance to a
tenth-rate American town in which the Australian gum-trees had been
acclimatised, as they have been in some malarious spots in California.
And in places I seemed to recall Americanised Honolulu. Yet it was not
this which made me feel I knew Pretoria. It was something in the aspect
of the people, something in the air of the men, combined doubtless with