worn-out ones. Every traveller realizes this.
For my part, in the mountains, I always feel like that Eton boy of
fourteen, who was at the Battle of Waterloo. His first letter home was
to this effect: "Dear Mamma: Cousin Tom and I are all right. I never
saw anything like it in my life."

There are few birds hereabout. I have only seen a robin and a hawk.
The hawk hovered above as if undecided what to do and then fell as if
he had been dropped from a plummet. This bird has an instinct for the
straight line that might shame even a Dominion land surveyor. This and
the fact that the hawk has been known to eat mosquitoes, are his only
claims to our attention or respect. All the world knows him for a
predaceous bird, and that his heart is a fierce furnace.

A nice-seeming man who is working on the road tells me there are many
kinds of animals in the Banff Park, but that they are all preserved.
In the corral there are eighty buffaloes. The corral consists of two
thousand acres. The white-tailed deer are so tame they come up to the
village. There are wolverines, too, and these animals are of so
covetous a nature they will steal even a frying pan. The Indians call
them _carcajous_, which means "the gluttons."

This man says he was formerly a fur-pup, by which expression he means a
trapper. He left the trap-line because his partner was always
objecting to bacon for dinner. Huh! Huh! to hear him complain, one
might almost think the Lord grew bacon for consumption at breakfast
only.

Riding up the hill through the green trees, I feel as if I were in the
opening paragraph of a story, and an half expecting at each bend of the
road to meet a knight in armour with a retinue of servants. As he
fails to appear I talk to Swallow, my mare, and she twitches her ears
as though she understands. Indeed, there is little doubt but that she
does.

"Let us stay awhile here," say I, "and look at this gay young squirrel.
He is enlarging his burrow as if he intended finishing it in five
minutes. He is no hireling squirrel. What say you, Swallow?"

If a mare can laugh, this one does, but maybe it is only her way of
coughing.

"And I have an idea, Swallow, that she is inside with four or five baby
squirrels, who think the world is lined with fur and that life consists
in drawing nutriment from a warm breast. This must be the way of it."

"Step along, my pretty one, and may it happen we shall find the Knight
round the next t