ng of pioneer days and thrusting,
twentieth-century virility.

It is a town like no other that we had visited, and where one had the
feeling that up-to-date card-indexing systems were being worked by men
in the woolly riding chaps of old plainsmen.

In the people of the streets one experienced the same curious sense of
"difference." In splendid boulevards such as Main, and Portage, which
turns from it, there are stores worthy of New York and London in size,
smartness and glowing attraction. And the women crowds that make these
streets busy are as crisply dressed in modern fashions as any on the
Continent, but there is a definite individuality in the air of the men.

Canadian men dress with a conspicuous indifference. They wear anything
from overalls and broad-banded sweaters to lounge suits that ever seem
ill-fitting. In Winnipeg there is the same disregard for personal
appearance plus a hat with a higher crown. As we went West the crown
of the soft hat climbed higher, and the brim became both wider and more
curly.

There is, too, on the sidewalks of Winnipeg the conglomeration of races
that go to feed the West. The city is the great emigrant centre that
serves the farmers, the fruit-growers of the Rockies, the ranchmen in
the foothills, and even the industries on the Pacific Slopes.
Everywhere outside agencies there are great blackboards on which
demands for farm labourers at five dollars a day and other workers are
chalked.

To these agencies flow strange men in blouse-shirts, wearing strange
caps--generally of fur--carrying strange-looking suit-cases and
speaking the strange tongues of far European or Asiatic lands. Chinese
and Japanese (whom the Canadian lumps under the general term
"Orientals"), negroes, a few Indians, and a hotch-potch of races walk
the streets of Winnipeg, and Winnipeg deals with them, houses them,
gives them advice, and distributes them over the wide lands of Canada,
where they will work and working will gradually fuse into the racial
whole that is the Canadian race.

In the hotels, too, one notices that a change is taking place. The
"Oriental"--the Japanese in this case--takes the place of the Canadian
bell-boy and porter, and he takes this place more and more as one goes
West. There are, of course, always Chinese "Chop Suey and Noodles'
Restaurants," as well as Chinese laundries in Canadian towns; we met
them as early as St. John's, Newfoundland; but from Winnipeg to the
Pacif