nearthly glory, and we drew in our breath when a great peak
behind us glowed for a moment rosy red and then faded into saffron, just
before a long shaft of radiance turned the whiteness on its shoulders into
incandescence.

"What do you think of that, Lee?" Harry asked.

The old man, staring about him with a great wonder in his eyes, answered,
with half-coherent solemnity: "It's the Almighty's handiwork made
manifest;" and as we swept across a trestle and the trembling timber flung
back the vibratory din, I caught the disjointed phrases, "The framing of
the everlastin' hills; a sign an' a token while the earth shall last--an'
there are many who will not see it."

"Just so," said the surveyor, smiling across at me. "Now, I'm a mechanic,
and look at it in a practical way. To me it's a tremendous display of
power, which is irresistible, even though it works mighty slowly. Sun,
wind, and frost, all doing their share in rubbing out broad valleys and
wearing down the hills, and, with the debris, the rivers are spreading new
lands for wheat and fruit west into the sea. 'Wild nature run riot,
chaotic desolation!' it says in the guide. No, sir; this is a great
scheme, and I guess there's neither waste nor riot. Well, that is not our
business; it's our part to make a way to take out ore and produce, and
bring in men--this is going to be an almighty great country. Timber for
half the world, gold and silver, iron, lead, coal, and copper, rivers to
give you power for nothing wherever you like to tap one with a dynamo, and
a coast that's punctuated with ready-made harbors! All we want is men and
railroads, and we mean to get them. I figure that if sometime our
children--I'm thankful I've got none--move the greatest Empire's center
West, they'll leave Montreal and Ottawa rusting, and locate it here
between the Rockies and the sea. But I guess I'm talking nonsense, and
there's a little in the flask--here's to the New Westminster, and blank
all annexationists!"

Harry nodded as he passed the flask on to me, while Lee groaned
deprecatingly, and then, brushing the gray hair back from his forehead
with thin crooked fingers, said: "An' by then there'll be no more cold
homes and hunger for the poor in England. It's coming, the time we've been
waiting, starving, and some of us praying for so long, an' if they get
their own by law, or take it tramplin' through the blood of the oppressor,
they'll live and speak free Englishmen, spread out on