she could feel as she was now
feeling, she would not have believed it. She was then in Rome, steeped
in, ravished by the past--assisted by what is, in its way, the most
agreeable society in Europe. Here she was absorbed in a rushing present;
held by the vision of a colossal future; and society had dropped out of
her ken. Quebec, Montreal and Ottawa had indeed made themselves pleasant
to her; she had enjoyed them all. But it was in the wilderness that the
spell had come upon her; in these vast spaces, some day to be the home
of a new race; in these lakes, the playground of the Canada of the
future; in these fur stations and scattered log cabins; above all in the
great railway linking east and west, that she and her brother had come
out to see.

For they had a peculiar relation to it. Their father had been one of its
earliest and largest shareholders, might indeed be reckoned among its
founders. He had been one, also, of a small group of very rich men who
had stood by the line in one of the many crises of its early history,
when there was often not enough money in the coffers of the company to
pay the weekly wages of the navvies working on the great iron road. He
was dead now, and his property in the line had been divided among his
children. But his name and services were not forgotten at Montreal, and
when his son and widowed daughter let it be known that they desired to
cross from Quebec to Vancouver, and inquired what the cost of a private
car might be for the journey, the authorities at Montreal insisted on
placing one of the official cars at their disposal. So that they were
now travelling as the guests of the C.P.R.; and the good will of one of
the most powerful of modern corporations went with them.

They had left Toronto, on a May evening, when the orchards ran, one
flush of white and pink, from the great lake to the gorge of Niagara,
and all along the line northwards the white trilliums shone on the
grassy banks in the shadow of the woods; while the pleasant Ontario
farms flitted by, so mellowed and homelike already, midway between the
old life of Quebec, and this new, raw West to which they were going.
They had passed, also--but at night and under the moon--through the lake
country which is the playground of Toronto, as well known, and as
plentifully be-named as Westmoreland; and then at North Bay with the
sunrise they had plunged into the wilderness,--into the thousand miles
of forest and lake that lie betwee