years ago I come to Canada by steerage--third class. _And_ I have
the language to learn. Look at me! I have now my own dairy business, in
Calgary, and--look at me!--my own half section, that is, three hundred
and twenty acres. All my land which is mine! And now I come home, first
class, for Christmas here in Denmark, and I shall take out back with me,
some friends of mine which are farmers, to farm on those irrigated lands
near by Calgary. Oh, I tell you there is nothing wrong with Canada for a
man which works.'

'And will your friends go?' I inquired.

'You bet they will. It is all arranged already. I bet they get ready to
go now already; and in three years they will come back for Christmas
here in Denmark, first class like me.'

'Then you think Calgary is going ahead?'

'You bet! We are only at the beginning of things. Look at me! Chickens?
I raise chickens also in Calgary,' etc., etc.

After all this pageant of unrelieved material prosperity, it was a rest
to get to the stillness of the big foothills, though they, too, had been
in-spanned for the work of civilisation. The timber off their sides was
ducking and pitch-poling down their swift streams, to be sawn into
house-stuff for all the world. The woodwork of a purely English villa
may come from as many Imperial sources as its owner's income.

The train crept, whistling to keep its heart up, through the winding
gateways of the hills, till it presented itself, very humbly, before the
true mountains, the not so Little Brothers to the Himalayas. Mountains
of the pine-cloaked, snow-capped breed are unchristian things.

Men mine into the flanks of some of them, and trust to modern science to
pull them through. Not long ago, a mountain kneeled on a little mining
village as an angry elephant kneels; but it did not get up again, and
the half of that camp was no more seen on earth. The other half still
stands--uninhabited. The 'heathen in his blindness' would have made
arrangements with the Genius of the Place before he ever drove a pick
there. 'As a learned scholar of a little-known university once observed
to an engineer officer on the Himalaya-Tibet Road--'You white men gain
nothing by not noticing what you cannot see. You fall off the road, or
the road falls on you, and you die, and you think it all an accident.
How much wiser it was when we were allowed to sacrifice a man
officially, sir, before making bridges or other public works. Then the
local gods were offi