ts its waters into the northern
end of the great Lake Winnipeg, fully one thousand three hundred miles
from the glacier cradle where it took its birth. This river, which has
along it every diversity of hill and vale, meadow-land and forest,
treeless plain and fertile hillside, is called by the wild tribes who
dwell along its glorious shores, the Saskatchewan or "rapid-flowing
river." But this Saskatchewan is not the only river which drains the
great central region between Red River and the Rocky Mountains. The
Assiniboine or "stony river" drains the rolling prairie-lands five
hundred miles west from Red River; and many a smaller stream, and
rushing, bubbling brook, carries into its devious channel the waters of
that vast country which lies between the American boundary line and the
pine woods of the Lower Saskatchewan.

So much for the rivers; and now for the land through which they flow.
How shall we picture it? how shall we tell the story of that great,
boundless, solitary waste of verdure? The old, old maps, which the
navigators of the sixteenth century formed from the discoveries of Cabot
and Cartier, of Verrazanno and Hudson, played strange pranks with the
geography of the New World. The coast-line, with the estuaries of large
rivers, was tolerably accurate; but the centre of America was
represented as a vast inland sea, whose shores stretched far into the
Polar North--a sea through which lay the much-coveted passage to the
long-sought treasures of the old realms of Cathay. Well, the geographers
of that period erred only in the description of ocean which they placed
in the centre of the continent; for an ocean there is--an ocean through
which men seek the treasures of Cathay even in our own times. But the
ocean is one of grass, and the shores are the crests of mountain ranges
and the dark pine forests of sub-Arctic regions. The great ocean itself
does not present such infinite variety as does this prairie-ocean of
which we speak:--in winter, a dazzling surface of purest snow; in early
summer, a vast expanse of grass and pale pink roses; in autumn, too
often a wild sea of raging fire! No ocean of water in the world can vie
with its gorgeous sunsets; no solitude can equal the loneliness of a
night-shadowed prairie: one feels the stillness, and hears the silence:
the wail of the prowling wolf makes the voice of solitude audible; the
stars look down through infinite silence upon a silence almost as
intense. This ocean