Edmonton.

When I awake the train is standing stock-still. Here is the trouble!
the heavy rains have been playing havoc with the newly-made grades that
have hardly been shaken down to stay, and progress is necessarily slow
till the proper ballast has been laid on. Outside, on the grade, the
fireman is swearing with remarkable precision. His language is not
exactly that described by the Prayer-book as "comfortable words," but
then, a man who fires up with slack coal when the thermometer is
sometimes thirty degrees below zero naturally becomes proficient in the
use of secular expletives.

I open my window above him and say very distinctly, "Wicked man! swear
not by the Lord Christ." Then I lean back so that he may not see me.
It must have surprised him to hear such a reproof in this no-woman's
land. Out he goes and looks up and around, and up again, but I keep
well hidden. That writer who conceived the horror of _The Wandering
Voice_ was no nid-noddy fellow, I can tell you.

As I was thinking this very thing, a voice close behind said to me,
"Wicked woman! play not the oracles," and almost I fell out of the
cupola with fright. It was the glorious tall stranger, and he was
laughing mightily. I almost hated him. Indeed, I quite hated till I
saw the joke and laughed too.

He had been reading in the opposite bunk and, incidentally, watching so
that I might not roll out, for it is a high climb to the cupola bunk,
and there are no sides to it. He says that he is an engineer and that
the boys who left the train at Bickerdike gave him instructions to see
that I got through all right. Did I say mean things awhile ago about
certain northern men? Did I? Well then, I am a spiteful jade and my
tongue should be split.

He has yellow fruit for me, and cherries, but hands them out carefully,
for the smell of steam from the stove shows that dinner is deliciously
imminent. The cook is turning cakes on a pan with a spat like the
sound of clog-dancers on the stage. He turns them with a grace and
intelligence which I may never hope to equal. I have an idea his elbow
and wrist work on ball-bearings.

The glorious tall stranger whose name is _not_ Burney (but it will do
as well as any other) tells me he was reared down by the Miramichi
River. He went back East to see his mother last Christmas, but it took
her some days to get used to the grown man who had left home a lad. I
can see this thing in my mind's eye. His mot