irst trans-continental train, which was to bind
the Provinces of Canada into a Dominion, and make Winnipeg into one of
the cities of the world. Trade by the river died, but meantime the
railway from the south kept pouring in a steady stream of immigration,
which distributed itself according to its character and in obedience
to the laws of affinity, the French Canadian finding a congenial home
across the Red River in old St. Boniface, while his English-speaking
fellow-citizen, careless of the limits of nationality, ranged whither
his fancy called him. With these, at first in small and then in larger
groups, from Central and South Eastern Europe, came people strange in
costume and in speech; and holding close by one another as if in terror
of the perils and the loneliness of the unknown land, they segregated
into colonies tight knit by ties of blood and common tongue.

Already, close to the railway tracks and in the more unfashionable
northern section of the little city, a huddling cluster of little
black shacks gave such a colony shelter. With a sprinkling of
Germans, Italians and Swiss, it was almost solidly Slav. Slavs of
all varieties from all provinces and speaking all dialects were
there to be found: Slavs from Little Russia and from Great Russia,
the alert Polak, the heavy Croatian, the haughty Magyar, and
occasionally the stalwart Dalmatian from the Adriatic, in speech
mostly Ruthenian, in religion orthodox Greek Catholic or Uniat
and Roman Catholic. By their non-discriminating Anglo-Saxon
fellow-citizens they are called Galicians, or by the unlearned,
with an echo of Paul's Epistle in their minds, "Galatians." There
they pack together in their little shacks of boards and tar-paper,
with pent roofs of old tobacco tins or of slabs or of that same
useful but unsightly tar-paper, crowding each other in close
irregular groups as if the whole wide prairie were not there
inviting them. From the number of their huts they seem a colony of
no great size, but the census taker, counting ten or twenty to a hut,
is surprised to find them run up into hundreds. During the summer
months they are found far away in the colonies of their kinsfolk,
here and there planted upon the prairie, or out in gangs where new
lines of railway are in construction, the joy of the contractor's
heart, glad to exchange their steady, uncomplaining toil for the
uncertain, spasmodic labour of their English-speaking rivals. But
winter finds them once mo