CHAPTER XVIII

INTO THE ROCKIES WITH A DEFENDER OF THE FAITH

For several days I had seen the Rockies far off—a black and jagged coil of mountains, that seemed at times almost to be moving like some prehistoric great scaly beast on its endless crawl across the plains. Now I was to see them near by—some part of them at least. What has any man seen in that ocean of mountains but a few drops?

At the unpleasing hour of 3.30 A.M. I disengaged myself from one of the three double beds with which my room in the hotel was furnished, washed slightly, dressed completely, and walked to the station. Calgary was quiet at last. There had been a sound of revelry by night. A man with a tenor voice had been singing songs in some adjacent room to the hotel up to 3.30. But his songs and the vamped accompaniment to them had ceased now, and peace prevailed. I don't remember to have passed any one on the way to the station. There were two or three sleepy-eyed people lounging about there; there always seem to be a few in Canadian stations, no matter what the hour. I think they must be out-of-works who keep their spirits up by listening to the squeaking and clash of shunting trucks, and the letting off of steam, and the great clang of the bells that are sounded from the engines as a trans-continental train comes in—all those sounds of life and hustle that are dear to the Canadian soul.

MOUNT LEFROY. CANADIAN ROCKIES.
MOUNT LEFROY. CANADIAN ROCKIES.

My pipe held the balance between us and gradually soothed the rebellious part of me. It was still too dark to see anything, and there was nothing to be done but wait patiently for the dawn. I could not but regret that I was missing the scenery of the foothills, for which those who have lived among them seem to have a peculiar affection. But I was consoled by the entry a little later of two fellow-passengers, who had evidently been disturbed in their sleep and wanted smoke and conversation. Strange and various types one sees in a Westbound train. The West is still—even to the Canadian born—the Unknown and the Happy Hunting-grounds and Eldorado and Ultima Thule and the Blessed Isles. West is where the farmer's son of spirit goes to seek fresh lands, where the prospector goes to find gold, where successful men go because they want to be more successful, or maybe because they want to retire and enjoy themselves, and they have heard that West there is a climate which hardly includes winter, and has none at all of that fierce break-up of winter which makes the plains in parts trying to the toughest constitution; where the failures go because they have tried all other places, and the last is West. All sorts of other men may be seen going West too—bank clerks and lumbermen, commercial travellers and engineers, tourists and politicians, trappers and amateurs of sport. But I never saw a more strangely assorted pair than these two men who came into the smoking compartment where I sat as the train mounted the foothills.

One was a very old man. I do not know what his profession was, but his clothes and himself were equally weather-stained and dirty. He had the coarsest snow-white hair hanging in cords about his neck and cheeks and mouth, which gave him the appearance of a vicious old billy-goat. He was, I discovered, a moderately vicious old man. The other was a lumberjack—hardly more than a boy, sturdy, and strikingly handsome, with the clearest blue eyes and a complexion that a woman would give a fortune for. The old man—as they came in together—was already engaged in telling the young one what you might call a backwoods smoking-room story, and he went on with others even thicker, over which the young one betrayed the hugest amusement. What particularly won his laughter and admiration was the fact that so elderly a person should enter into such topics with so much zest. I can still hear him repeating, 'There ain't many fellows as old as you, Daddy, that 'ud be such sports. No, sir.'

And the old man would grin and chuckle at the compliment, and become more highly improper in the warmth of the boy's praise. He became indeed so elevated by it—especially after the boy had got up once or twice and executed a brief step-dance to mark the exuberance of his delight—that, thinking to gain even more glory by being still more startling, he dropped the subject of women and took up that of religion. It seemed he was an atheist of the old three-shots-a-penny variety, and he went for Christianity hot and strong. He had, it must be admitted, a perfectly skilled command of the old cheap arguments, and marshalled them in good order. Only, the unexpected happened. The boy, who had not minded being boyishly wicked, was plainly shocked by this new thing, and he said so in language so warm that a minister of the faith he was defending would have felt positively faint to hear it. The old man, surprised and still more annoyed, brought out further iconoclastic arguments, excellently directed. It is true any theologian could have warded them off easily enough. Any debater could have. But it was clear that the boy had never argued in his life. That didn't matter. He was not going to sit there and listen to that sort of thing. He got indeed quite hopelessly confused; intellectually he was tripped time and again; he deferred with a lamb's innocence to the old man's boasts of having perused Persian literature, Hebrew literature, all the books that have to do with Buddhism and Zoroastrianism (I am afraid I did not believe any of this); he allowed that so much learning and thought must be a fine thing, but not an inch did he yield of his creed. And the more the old man got at him with arguments the more sulphurous grew the boy's language. I have never known so queer a Defender of the Faith as that lumberjack—or in a way a more successful one. His manner was childlike, his words unprintable; he made a muddle whenever he attempted to follow the simplest of the old villain's inferences. Yet never the least shake could his opponent give him, and his dogged reiteration of the statement that 'A man by —— could only stick to the —— faith that he had, and Daddy was a —— fool to think his that —— arguments made any difference'—wore the old free-thinker out in the end. He did not give in, but he gave up: a wiser but, it is to be feared, not a better old man.

Meanwhile we were getting into the hills, and my first impressions were rather of great rocks than of mountains. Most people, I suppose, come upon the Rockies first from the east, and they seem tremendous if only for the reason that one has come upon them after days spent in those plains which, even while they rise, rise imperceptibly. But tremendous as they seem from the east, they must be far more so from the north, and far more beautiful from the west. On the east the mountains have less height than on the north. Their timber is poor by comparison with the trees that grow further west; their valleys have little of the luxuriance of the Pacific valleys. One feels a certain coldness and hardness about them, and after a little while there seems almost a monotony of corrugated peaks, all thrown together and slanting eastward. They are striking enough even so, and the view from the train, especially when one considers that railways are run through mountains by the easiest route not by the finest, and that grades have to be counted before landscapes, cannot disappoint anybody.

A TRAIL IN THE ROCKIES
A TRAIL IN THE ROCKIES

Comparisons with the Alps and the Himalayas should be kept till the Rockies have been seen at closer quarters. The finest view I ever had of the Rockies was from a mountain in the Selkirks, at a height of over ten thousand feet, and over a hundred miles from the nearest railway. There I forgot to make comparisons, which after all are somewhat useless. It is easy to say that the Alps are softer and more pictorial—showing that deep blue sky above their snows, which is rarely if ever to be seen in the Rockies. The Canadian skies are too lofty and distant ever to seem to be resting even on the topmost snowfields. The Himalayas again have giants unparalleled. Kinchinjunga, leaning out of the clouds, cannot be matched among the Rockies. But the Rockies—well, the Rockies are different. As yet we are only just getting to Banff.

CHAPTER XIX

A HOT BATH IN BANFF

Everybody stops at Banff. The popular places of the world are not necessarily the most beautiful; and even if they start beautiful, they are not rendered more so by the accretion in their midst of a large number of even first-class hotels. Perhaps first-class hotels increase the feeling for beauty. Indeed the sole defence of luxury worth consideration is that it has this effect. Without luxury, would there exist such an appreciator of beauty as d'Annunzio, to name but one? Pardon, I am getting away from Banff.

It is a very beautiful watering-place at the foot of mountains. It is not spoilt yet, and it will be difficult to spoil it. The air is superb. I learnt that just as I was getting into it on my way from the station. I seemed to be the only person walking into it that morning—except for a local Canadian who was going in to his work. It was still very early in the morning, and distinctly cold, and I said to this Canadian workman:

'It's pretty cold at Banff.'

'It's the finest air in Canada,' he replied, with that characteristic touch of resentment of anything that might be taken as a criticism of his native heath, which every Canadian invariably shows. 'Yes, sir, it's the finest air in Canada, and they're putting down concrete sidewalks.'

He was, as a matter of fact, engaged in that work himself, and after I had expressed a proper admiration of it, he became friendly enough and directed me to the hotel I wanted to stay in.

I wish it had not rained at Banff while I was there. It was an unusually cold and early rain, and it prevented me from seeing many of the sights of the place. The motor boat, which as a rule runs several times a day up the Bow River, did not run at all while I was there, and so I did not see this lovely valley. Nor did I take much stock of the buffaloes of the National Park, which are one of the greatest features of Banff, one that tourists with cameras always make for first. Rain was the reason of my abstention. On the other hand, the rain was the immediate cause of my spending a most delightful afternoon in a hot sulphur swimming-bath. There are three such baths in Banff, and I chose the upper one, walking two miles up a winding road, whose woods were beginning to show all the reds of autumn, to get to it. I found that it was an open-air bath, fed by a sulphur stream that trickles steaming down the face of a mountain, and since no one had been tempted there on so gloomy a day, I had it all to myself, and swam up and down in water that varied from 110° to 95° for an hour or more, looking at the hilltops opposite, and the mists that rose and sank about them. The rain and the cold mattered nothing so long as I swam there, wondering if luxury could go further in this world of ours. For there I was lapped about with all the warmth and peace that come to the beach-comber or the lotus-eater, and yet drinking in the brisk mountain air and feeling the challenge of the hills. It was to combine the emotions of a man climbing the Alps with the emotions of a man squatting in a Turkish bath; and only when the latter threatened to become rather the stronger of the two, did I get out, feeling weak but fresh. I had the pleasure while dressing of reading in a printed advertisement of the baths that I had been curing myself of rheumatism, sciatica, asthma, anæmia, insomnia and, I fancy, any other disease I might happen to have latent. Certainly I felt well and uncommonly drowsy when I got back to the hotel. Indeed those who intend to explore Banff with energy would be well advised to postpone the baths till their last day. There is plenty to explore. The National Park alone is 5400 square miles in extent, and encloses half a dozen subsidiary ranges of the Rocky Mountains; and if Banff is to be regarded as the centre for mountain climbing, fishing, and big game hunting, there is of course no end to it. Guide-books mention in a vague way that it is such a centre—which only means that if you want to do any of these things from a highly civilised and comfortable hotel, you had better make Banff your stopping place. Good climbing is to be had quite near, but whether the same is to be said for shooting or fishing depends upon whether anything short of the best in these matters is good. You cannot expect fish and big game to remain centralised. Particularly is this the case with big game. They avoid the centre of things, and prefer to keep on the circumference. In these sort of matters guide-books are very little use. Nowhere do conditions change more rapidly than in Canada, and the man who wants big-horn or big trout will have to make for the circumference too. But there he will neither expect nor find first-class hotels.

Speaking of first-class hotels, I took part—quite an unwilling part—in an incident that goes to show some of the difficulties attendant upon trying to run them in Canada. Frankly, except for those run by the Canadian Pacific Railway, there are practically none. It is not to be wondered at. Cookery is an art, like literature or music, not greatly encouraged in a new country. Take waiters again. Though the wages they make are good and the standard of waiting expected from them is rarely the highest, I believe they are a perennial difficulty to hotel proprietors. On the trains and in the big towns in the East one usually finds that the waiters are Englishmen not long out; and they are so not because they have acquired the science of waiting in the old country (as one might suppose, since it is usually well learnt there), but because they have not as yet acquired that Canadian spirit which makes anything savouring of domestic service—or even of undue courtesy as from man to man—distasteful to the Canadian born, who, in any case, dislikes working for uncertainly long hours. Englishmen, it has to be admitted, are not particularly zealous for long and uncertain hours of work either in these days; and therefore it generally happens that as soon as the newcomer is the least acclimatised, he, too, drops waiting if he has taken it up. In the East a freshly arrived immigrant takes his place; but in the West there is no such constant supply of spare white men. The result is that Western hotels are more or less driven to employ as waiters either women or Japanese and Chinese boys.

The hotel I stayed in at Banff had a staff of the former. Heaven knows we have women waiters enough in England, but in Canada I do not think heaven can know.... As soon as I came in to breakfast in the morning I became aware of a sharp-featured maiden with eyeglasses and tight lips and stiff white cuffs—very much the type of the Girton girl in the older times—who was clearly in charge of the room, and meant to let every one know it. I shrank down at the nearest table, and in a hushed voice requested and received my breakfast from one of the waitresses who were theoretically in attendance. She was very kindly, only she brought me tea instead of coffee. I wanted coffee. I felt it was taking a risk, but as a man at his breakfast usually prefers his own fancy to other people's, I looked about delicately to see if I could catch my waitress's eye and induce her to change the pot. By bad fortune I merely caught the eye of the sharp young lady who, coming up and learning from my unwilling lips that I had been given the wrong drink, said imperiously:

'Kindly tell me which of the girls gave you this!'

Now I had not particularly noticed the girl who had been good enough to help me—an inexcusable carelessness—which the sharp young woman evidently interpreted as a desire to fence with her, for while I hesitated she went on:

'I'll tell you why I want to know. There's some game on this morning——'

'Oh,' I said, 'yes.'

'And I'm not going to stand it,' said the sharp young woman fiercely. 'I fired two of the girls yesterday, and I don't mind if I fire the lot, so if you'll tell me which of them brought you this I'll see to her straight away.'

'I'm afraid I should not know her again,' I said hastily. A scene of strife around my unlucky person, while breakfast got cold and all the other guests at the other tables looked on, was terrible to my fancy. The sharp one seemed most disappointed.

'I wish you could,' she said. 'I'd fix her right now.'

'Quite impossible,' I murmured, hoping that I was speaking the truth. Not so far off there was a young woman, standing chatting genially with two men at another table, who might have brought me that tea.

'Oh, well, of course if you can't,' said the sharp one, and presently brought me coffee with her own fair white-cuffed hands. I thanked her warmly, and she went away; after which I was rewarded for my supposed chivalry by the young woman who had been entertaining those other two men coming up to me and saying in a sweet voice:

'I say, I'm awfully sorry that I brought you that tea instead of coffee. The fact is we're awfully rushed this morning.'

'Not at all,' I said, 'don't think of it,' and hoped inwardly that she would go away before the sharp one spotted her and bore down upon us. She did not seem so rushed as she had said.

'Sure you won't have anything else now?' she persisted in the kindliest way.

'No, thank you,' I said, and seeing, I suppose, that I was not an entertaining person, she flitted gracefully away to a third table where another male sat, to whom I heard her whisper in passing—on the way to further chat with the other two men:

'Now, mind you don't forget to meet me outside the hotel at six sharp!'

My sympathies almost went out to the sharp-visaged spinster, for really there were quite a number of guests looking about them for food while the rushed staff chatted freely and pleasantly with such male visitors as seemed by their bearing to be worthy of being fascinated. This at breakfast-time—breakfast-time when an Englishman at all events wants food and would not be put off by the conversation of Cleopatra or Helen of Troy. Canadians may be a more gallant race at this hour of the day, but I am not sure of this. The preponderance of Japanese waiters as one gets further West seems to point to the fact that even they prefer food—at meal-times—to sentiment. The Japanese may demand high wages, and leave their places suddenly if they feel like it, but at least they do not threaten one with an emotional scene over one's morning coffee. Nor do I imagine that they require to be treated by their employers with quite that reverential respect of which I remember seeing an example in a small hotel in the Columbia Valley. I was stopping at the hotel over Sunday with a friend, and as we wanted to go out for the day, we asked the manager if we could be supplied with some sandwiches for lunch. He was a mild and obliging young man, but his face fell.

'I'll—I'll see what can be done,' he said, and I heard him go to the young lady who vouchsafed to wait at table occasionally in a superior way. 'My God!' I heard him say in an extremely humble voice to her, 'I'm most awfully sorry to ask such a thing of you, but these chaps want to go out and take some sandwiches. I say, do you suppose it could be managed?'

We got two sandwiches each as a result of his intercession, and in that mountain air we could have done with six times the number. But we realised from the manager's face when he brought them to us that the goddess who had provided them might, instead of doing so, have stalked straight out of the hotel for good.

CHAPTER XX

CANADA AND WOMAN

Few books are complete nowadays without a chapter on the woman question. Man can be treated of in between; one would not as yet care to write a book without mentioning man in it. As a subsidiary agent for keeping the world going man is still not without his importance. But woman, as I have said, must have a chapter to herself. And since I unwittingly arrived on the last page at the subject of woman's work in Canada, I will pause—even on the threshold of the mountains—and go further into the matter.

The most noticeable thing about woman in Western Canada is that she has not yet arrived there. If any one wished to get an idea of how the world would arrange itself supposing there were no women in it at all, they would have to go a little further north and west, into some of the British Columbian valleys or into the Yukon country, and look around.

What a simple world it seems. No clothes question, no washing, the simplest cookery, one man one plate (and that plate never washed), one knife for eating with or for skinning a grizzly bear, no carpets or curtains in the houses, no dustings or spring-cleanings, no knick-knacks to knock over or break, no flowers without or within except such as grow wild, no luxuries, in short, either to enjoy or to pay for, and a terrible amount of dirt. That is the physical aspect of the world without women.

The spiritual side of it is less easy to arrive at. These bachelors you see in the backwoods are a silent people, lacking in self-consciousness, and, I daresay, in manners, but law-abiding and amiable and peculiarly handy. All men are handy who have not women to steal that talent from them; and most womenless men are silent too. One knows, of course, that bores may be found among men at times, but never chatterboxes. There is something to be said for the view that speech arose by women putting questions so often that men were driven, in sheer weariness, to make answers.

Does it seem an unattractive life that these hardy bachelors have perforce to live? Perhaps. But you will not find them bemoaning their lot. That is not the way of bachelors. We know they are to be pitied, but they do not pity themselves. Seriously, the trouble with these men is that they have none of those inducements to consider the future which make a man better than a machine. They take the world as it comes, which is well enough for themselves but not well enough for the world. I doubt if it is well for themselves really. True, they have nothing to worry them so long as they are in health. They can make big money when they choose and take holidays when they choose, conscious that when their money is spent they have only to set to again. Their wages are indeed to them little more than trinkgeld—and this means that those splendid workers have no real reward for their work, leave no successors to carry on the traditions of their toil, enrich only the bar-keepers and the rogues who live on the folly of honest men.

Clearly the most honourable opening for women in Canada is marriage. Only wives are capable of putting down the drink curse, preventing the growth of a particularly odious plutocracy, establishing a permanent instead of a nomad population in the West. Nor might it be a bad thing (but for Anglo-Saxon prejudices) if provincial governments there could start marriage offices, due attention being paid to eugenics. Even in so small a matter as the following, the presence of wives should make all the difference. All down the Columbia valley I found the cattle ranchers, who were bachelors, drinking tinned milk, while scores of cows ran wild and went dry. When I asked if it wasn't worth while to keep one cow milking, I was always told, 'No, we haven't time to bother about it,' till I came to the shack of a married Swede, whose wife had time to bother about it. In his shack tinned milk was anathema, as it should be everywhere.

As prejudice would undoubtedly prevent the formation of governmental marriage offices, marriage can only be considered as an indirect opening for women. What are the directer openings? A great deal depends on what part of Canada immigrant women make for. In the East there is no such lack of women as in the West. The sexes are fairly balanced. In the big towns there is the usual demand for domestic servants, but not many more openings for educated Englishwomen than there are in big towns at home. There are a few more, because those cities are going at a faster pace than our English cities, and because all work there is more valuable than in England. Women skilled in the arts that have to do with personal decoration, such as millinery, dressmaking, etc., could make their way there.

Factory work in Canada is hardly worth going into here, the chief point about it being that wages are of course higher; nor did I notice any unusual professions engaging the attention of women, unless it were the checking of parcels and the playing in hotel orchestras, neither of which requires a man's strength.

THE HALT. LAGGAN.
THE HALT. LAGGAN.

French Canada offers employment to but very few. Western Canadians sniff at the Habitants because they let their women work in the fields; haymaking and hoeing. But the idea of using women as outdoor workers is not so uncivilised as it looks to those unaccustomed to seeing it. Ethnologists are agreed nowadays that the tribes in which women do the fieldwork are not the least but the most civilised, and maintain that the position of women among such tribes is higher than among any others. Women began to work out-of-doors because the primitive peoples believed in a connection between their fertility and that of the earth; and where they do such work, women are always the keepers of the grain store—hold in their hands, that is to say, the food upon which the life of the tribe depends. The most honourable primitive customs are not always the best in modern times, but there can be no doubt of the fertility of the French Canadians.

As one goes West, woman becomes more of an indoor creature; and this may be due to the greater chivalry of their men folk. But one has to remember that the great charm of Canadian life, especially on the prairies, is an outdoor charm—working in the exhilarating air—not cooking over a hot stove indoors. One hears of a few cases in which women have taken up farming or vegetable-gardening and made a success of it, but no one could honestly say that the fortune awaiting women who take up such work is usually a great one. The work is too hard, especially in the winter time. Chicken-ranching is perhaps easier; but the real demand in the West is for women to do that housework which the men have not time for. At such work capable women can earn from three to five pounds a month with board and lodging; and while they are likely to find it rather harder—certainly not less hard—than similar work at home, it has compensations besides the money to be made by it. For one thing there is none of the odium that attaches to it in the older countries. The cook is as good as her employer, who probably did the cook's work for years before the cook was to be had. It is natural that the work which most ladies have to do for themselves, because neither love nor money can obtain them substitutes, should lose its menial and unpleasant aspect, and the finest ladies in western Canada do it unashamed. Often their guests will help them to wash up, and even prepare the dinner. Personally, I found myself becoming quite expert at cleaning fish for a hostess who thereafter cooked it and dished it up, and yet appeared at table as fresh and elegant and apparently leisured as any lady who keeps a staff of servants in the old country. And I found as I got on that I rather liked cleaning fish.

It stands to reason that the lady help is not wanted. The precise duties demanded of such a lady are always a little misty, but I imagine that they include a little sewing and a little reading, the ability to chat pleasantly, to be good-tempered (and possibly a Protestant), to feed the canary, and, at a pinch, even to clean out its cage. None of these talents are needed in a new country, and I heard of forty women who were on the books of an employment office in Calgary, all wanting to be lady helps and all likely to go on wanting it till Doomsday.

One hears a good deal of discussion (not in Canada) of the openings in the colonies for educated women. There is an English committee—the Committee of Colonial Intelligence for Educated Women—which, 'recognising the crying need of our colonies for the best type of educated women,' undertakes to furnish them with detailed, practical and up-to-date information, before advising them to go out. This committee hopes later on to found settlements in the colonies, where training, suitable to the needs of each colony, can be given, and centres can be formed to which the girls can return in the intervals of employment. There is much sense both in the recognition of the need for educated women in the colonies and in the perception that the most educated woman will be lost there unless she is prepared to be practical. The truth is that that same adaptability which is required of men in Canada is required of women also. They must first suit the country before they can hope to leave their mark on it. Educated women can leave their mark there by their inward, not by their outward, superiority.

Centres to which the girls can go in the first place, and to which they can return in the intervals of employment, are an excellent idea, and one which central or local government authorities in Canada would do well to support. Of course the Young Women's Christian Association already gives much help in this direction, but it cannot be expected to have branches everywhere. New towns and settlements are planned and put through very quickly in Canada, and wherever they result in creating a demand for women's work, some such centre for girls as near the railway depot as possible should be started. For one thing it would facilitate the engagement of girls, for another it would attract a better class. Probably the best openings of all for women in Canada—educated women, I mean—are in the big cities of the furthest West. In Vancouver and Victoria wealthy people reside who can afford to pay for such luxuries as private school-mistresses and governesses. And the supply of women is not so great there. Women also seem to be more employed there as hotel manageresses and under-manageresses, and as cashiers in hotels and offices. I never heard of women being real estate agents, but in a profession in which the arts of persuasion play a leading part, there seems no reason why they should not shine. Of bachelor girls, living their own lives, I have also never heard in the West. They could hardly have the hearts to do it with so many bachelor men wasting their lives around them.

On the whole, the position of woman in Canada is one of honourable toil lightened by the high consideration in which they are held. They have hardly as yet obtained that dominant super-man eminence which American women are said to occupy. That is, perhaps, because they have not gone in so much for that culture and social fastidiousness by the lack of which in themselves some American husbands are made to feel their inferiority. On the other hand they seem to keep their men folk contented, and remain contented with them. Divorce is, I believe, uncommon in Canada.

CHAPTER XXI

THE LAKES AMONG THE CLOUDS

Who thinks the Rockies only of a forbidding magnificence, of a grandeur always dark and fierce? Let him go to Lake Louise. The only phrase I know that fits it is that German one—märchenhaft schön—lovely as a scene of fairyland. Coming upon it suddenly, on a moonlight night, it seems so unlooked-for, so exquisite, that one says to oneself, 'Surely it will vanish like a dream.'

LAKE LOUISE, LAGGAN, ALBERTA
LAKE LOUISE, LAGGAN, ALBERTA

It is quite a little lake, shut in for the most part by hills. The hills are wooded at their base, and wooded high up—wooded, indeed, right into the clouds; but higher still they turn to bare walls of rock or snow-strewn peaks, where the snow and the flowers grow side by side. Up among the heights other little lakes lie—the Lakes in the Clouds, they are called—and sometimes they are in the clouds and sometimes not, and they are coloured like thick opals and moonstones, and you can see the tall, slim firs growing at the bottom as if they were real trees and not only reflections. I think it is the colours of these lakes that are so fairy-like. People may say of the Rockies that they never give the contrast of white snow-fields and deep blue sky that is so marked in the Swiss and Italian Alps, but what of that? The colours they do yield are, in truth, far more delicate and varied—perhaps because the Canadian skies are so much loftier and farther away—and, if you do not believe it, go and look at the waters of Lake Louise. They are distilled from peacocks' tails and paved with mother-of-pearl, and into them rush those wild blues that are only mixed in the heart of glaciers.

Across the end of the lake stretches the hotel garden—green turf crossed by one great border of Iceland poppies, golden and orange, fringing the water front. One other plant I should have liked to see growing there—the opal anchusa. Its colour is so exactly the colour of the lake, in sun and in shadow. Still, more colour is hardly needed anywhere round Lake Louise. As I have said, the very snows are gay when you get to them, and pied with flowers, as old English meadows used to be when old English poets used that word, before scientific farming came in and determined that flowers were weeds and killed them. And I had thought of these valleys as black and frowning, full of melancholy noises among the trees, rather than windless and radiant.

The station for Lake Louise is Laggan, and the time to arrive there is in the evening, just before the moon rises. It does not matter if the drive up from the station is accomplished in the dark. The road is wooded and beautiful, but do not wish for the moon till the last bend of it leads you suddenly on to the lake. Then wish for the moon hard. Or, if you want to make sure of it, and the moon (though it seems always magical in its uprising) follows laws like other things and will not rise unless it is due to, make cold calculations some time ahead, and be sure they are right. There never could be anything better worth timing than moonrise on Lake Louise.

If the poppied air that was fabled to pervade certain lovely places in the old world hung about this region, there would be no coming away from it. You would remain gazing drowsily for ever at the lake like the lover on the Greek urn that Keats described. But all around are the mountains which distil an air keen and exhilarating, so that before you know it you are set walking, or riding or climbing—in some way adventuring forth. Some people adventure forth in a carriage, but that is rather too like going out to battle in evening clothes.

Myself, having but two days at my disposal—which I could very well have spent looking across the Iceland poppies at the lake—was urged by the air and a sense of duty to take a long walk the first day and a longish ride the second. For this second expedition I hired a mountain pony and decided to reach the Moraine Lake, which lies at the end of The Valley of the Ten Peaks. It was my first experience of a Rocky Mountain pony, and I will state at once that it was an unfavourable one. There exist, no doubt, a few excellent mountain ponies. I bestrode one or two later in different places. But this first one was so dispiriting that he warped my mind concerning the whole breed. The truth is that mountain ponies, being intended for the average tourist who seems to be not much of a rider, are both bred and trained to go no faster, and exhibit no more spirit than a bath-chair man. Not theirs to trot or canter, even if a smooth stretch of road present itself. Enough if they move steadily up mountain trails and along mountain ledges and down precipitous tracks in a manner designed to make the tourist feel that mules are stumbling creatures by comparison. Enough in one way but not in another, for to emulate a baser creature corrupts the best-bred pony in the world. Ponies have that much of humanity in them. Besides, it is not worth while to breed the best ponies for such work; and, further and anyway, a mountain pony is, so to say, a contradiction in species. A pony as much as a horse is a creature of the plains; place him in the mountains and he becomes something different—scarcely a pony at all. He is then an animal that picks up his feet in a marvellous way, is free from mountain sickness and the faintness that comes from high altitudes, and carries a pack or a person on his back. But he is no longer the friend of man. He is merely the tool of the tourist.

We started downhill—that pony and I—directly after lunch. Words—words—words. I mounted that pony directly after lunch. The road led downhill in the first instance. I tried to start the pony in that direction. That is a truer description of what actually happened. But after I had got his head set towards the Ten Peaks Valley, he slewed it round again. We had not by any means started. 'He is frightened of the hill,' I thought to myself, and redirected his head, encouraging him with words and reins. I had no whip. The owners of these hired mountain ponies seem to think whips unnecessary, and, indeed, they are very little use. I tried one cut from the roadside some five minutes later. We had by that time made about a hundred yards. I beat him also with his own reins and my heels, and we accomplished about a quarter of a mile downhill, going delicately. I said to myself, 'Patience. The descent will soon be over. The road then rises. We shall see a different animal.'

What I saw when we came, by sideways and prolonged efforts, to the first part of the ascent, was that, greatly as that pony hated a down-hill grade, far more did he loathe an uphill one. We mounted it at what seemed to be a mile an hour or less, and I groaned to think that we had eight or nine to accomplish before we got to the lake, and the same in returning. By late afternoon I judged we had made the half distance and were still going weakly. I had cut two or three different sticks by now, and encouraged the pony with different words from those I had used at the start. He woke up once or twice and trotted for a moment. The road was not really steep for most of the way; where it was steep I walked, dragging the pony behind me. He did not seem to mind whether I was on his back or off, provided no motion was required of him. I found it was cooler work to get off and pull him than to propel him from the saddle. Always he stood still for choice.

The road was good—good underfoot and good to observe from. On our left lay a broad valley, and on our right the hills. I should love to have paused voluntarily and absorbed the views, but in point of fact I only paused in passion to cut whips; the pony, meanwhile, grazing. He knew the road to the Moraine Lake better than I did, and he contested every inch of it.

I think I was aware long before the Ten Peaks came into sight that I should not reach the lake that day—or perhaps ever; but I was determined that I would at least see where it lay, though the sun set.

We came within sight of it at last. Before then the Ten Peaks had come into line one by one till there they stood, ten white peaks all in a row. At their base I thought I saw the lake lying, very still and cold among its ice-worn pebbles.

IN THE VALLEY OF THE TEN PEAKS. ROCKY MOUNTAINS.
IN THE VALLEY OF THE TEN PEAKS. ROCKY MOUNTAINS.

If I did not see it, if it was but a mirage, I do not greatly care. I achieved something more that afternoon than the mere sight of a lake. I got that pony back to the hotel almost in time for dinner. I was pretty stiff in the arms. It was not to be wondered at. Hauling a pony nine miles is no light work.

CHAPTER XXII

A SOLITARY RIDE INTO THE YOHO VALLEY

Emerald Lake is beautiful, but less beautiful, I think, than Lake Louise. It is more like a lake among mountains, and less like a lake in a dream. I went to it because I wanted to get into the Yoho Valley, if only for a day, and the trail from Emerald Lake into the Yoho is, I had heard, the most picturesque of all. Even superficially to see the valley takes four days, and I had left myself with only one, so that it was in a deprecating spirit that I asked the manageress of the lake chalet if I could at least get within sight of the valley and back before dark. She said that if I started at two o'clock punctually, on a pony, the thing could just be done. I said that I had tried one or two mountain ponies, and did not care about them when I was in a hurry.

ON THE TRAIL, YOHO VALLEY.
ON THE TRAIL, YOHO VALLEY.

'Oh, but I'll give you a slicker,' said the manageress. 'You see there's no run on the ponies at present, and I'll ask the man to give you his very best. He'll just get you there and back in time.'

I thanked her and said I would try the slicker; and, half an hour later, the slicker and I were skirting the wooded shore of the Emerald Lake at what was, for a mountain pony, quite a fast trot. We were alone together. There were a few guests at the chalet, but the lateness of the season and the snow-clouds that loomed on the horizon had deterred any of them from starting on the Yoho Valley trip that day. Earlier in the year, there would have been quite a party riding together with a guide in the direction I was taking, for there are four camps in the valley, placed at picturesque points an easy day's ride apart, where you may rest and sleep, one night beneath a waterfall, the next on the edge of a glacier, with the ponies tethered round, and the camp-fires crackling pleasantly, so that you feel that you are pioneering, but pioneering luxuriously.

But now, as I have said, it was late in the season, and the snow-clouds were holding themselves in the sky ready for further attacks, and a keen wind was beginning to rise, so that no one else thought the Yoho Valley tempting enough, and it was certain I should have it all to myself if I got there.

The trail was not difficult to follow. There, at the end of the lake, was a mountain pass visible from the chalet, and the thin white line that screwed about among the rocks and trees was the trail. The slicker trotted. He trotted through the wood that borders the lake; he trotted through a wonderful pebbled valley beyond it which might have been a sea beach (only everywhere slim spruces, like sharp, green, tenpenny nails, grew out of the pebbles); and he trotted up the first stretch of trail leading to the pass ahead of us. Then for an hour or more the slicker climbed as steadily as a Swiss guide. The trail was less than a yard wide and metalled with rolling stones, and though it wound continually, its most generous spirals left it, to my fancy, almost sheer. We wound with it, past boulders and hanging trees and little cataracts that shot through air from some invisible lips of stone above—between shadowy crags and over unprotected places where the sun glared. In the end the slicker brought me to the pass itself, and we rode into a dark wood there, and the trees grew bigger and bigger, and the trail grew stickier and stickier, and the pass ended suddenly, and below, far, far below, was the Yoho Valley.

The story of the boy who cried 'wolf' when there was no wolf is a familiar one, but much more familiar in everyday life is the story of the man who cries 'lion' when there is no lion. You know him and you don't believe him. You know that, moved by the immoderate enthusiasm which is the chief qualification for the profession of writing, he is doing his level best to make you believe that the object he is presenting to you is a lion, for the simple reason that if you believe it, you will be more attracted by it and him. Canada, being a much-advertised country at present, is full of lions. 'The finest view in Canada. Yes, sir.' How often I heard that remark! How often it turned out to be an overstatement. How distrustfully I came to listen to it.

Was it, then, that for some months I had imbibed the Canadian air, that when I reached the Rockies I too was carried away, and became as immoderately enthusiastic as any Canadian? I do not know. I merely have to confess that I was carried away, that I have already cried 'lion' more than once, and that I must do so once again now that I have got to the Yoho Valley. Baedeker saves his own dignity—and that of literature—by using an asterisk at these critical points, or two asterisks if his emotions are very poignant. But I, who have to fill paper, must use words. Well, I am not afraid of exaggerating the beauties of the Yoho. This valley of enormous trees spiring up from unseen gorges to wellnigh unseen heights; of cataracts that fall in foam a thousand feet; of massed innumerable glaciers; this valley into which it seems you could drop all Switzerland, and still look down—is not easily overpraised. The difficulty is to praise it at all adequately.

It seemed to me as I rode on along the high trail that sometimes edged out to the gulf below and sometimes swerved back from it, that one of the wonders of the valley was a thing that in smaller places would have made for disappointment, and that is that it lies, and always has lain, outside the human radius. It has none of those connections with men that set us thrilling in other parts. No Hannibal ever led his army by this route across these mountains. No hardy tribesmen watched the approach of an enemy among its crags, or bred among them a race of mountaineers. No gods dwelt on its heights, and no poets ever came near to sing them. History has nothing to tell of it. Little hills and little valleys have their stories and their songs, their memories and their miracles. They are haunted still with those forgotten mysteries which stir men's fancies more deeply than things remembered or discovered can. This valley walled about with mountains has been above and beyond men's ken from the beginning of the world: and now that men have come into it, they find nothing to discover in it except its vastness and immunity from the touch of men. It strikes one even now as not only devoid of human adjuncts but needless of them. A man no more looks for legends there than he would look for them in the centre of a typhoon.

I suppose that men did pass through it—even before the valley became a known part of the world, and even a sight for tourists. It was not, as the phrase goes, untrodden by the foot of man. A few prospectors must have passed this way from time to time many years ago. Some may have died there for all one knows. Indian hunters, too, would enter the valley in pursuit of game. But no one possessed it; no one gave it the human air: or, if they did, the records are lost. Prospectors tell us only of their finds, nothing of their lives. Of the Indians, some one someday may, perhaps, find some traces. At present their white brothers are little troubled by them or their history or their origin. Canadians are content to think of them as a primitive, decaying people who came from God knows where to a country they never realised was God's. It will be easier to forget them than to understand them, these strange men with faces no more expressive than wood, who, if they ever came to the Yoho Valley, must have passed through it more like trees walking among the trees than like men that stop and wonder, and leave a habitation and a name.

Shadowy, disregardable creatures, then, as uninfluential as the slicker and myself, may have roamed the valley in times past and left no more traces upon it. We two realising, I trust, our minuteness and unimportance, went on, as it turned out, far beyond the point intended for our afternoon's excursion. In contemplation of the valley I had given the slicker the rein, and he, poor pony, no doubt thought that he was bound for the first camp, there to rest the night in the ordinary course. Presently I found him, his two front feet planted firmly together, sliding down the slipperiest piece of trail we had yet encountered, sliding and sliding till we had got to the very bottom of the valley—whereupon I discovered that we had indeed attained the first camp.

It was a queer, unexpected sight—a few little lean-to tents and a couple of log huts, standing side by side on a flat piece of the valley floor, just beyond the spray of a cascade that dropped from ledge to ledge of the mountain opposite, starting so high up that it seemed to spring from the sky. The place seemed deserted, but while the slicker and I paused to look about us, out of the biggest tent there came a small, silent, yellow figure. It did not speak to me, but only stared, and I, having stared back for a little and having wondered if it were some gnome peculiar to the valley, suddenly saw that it had a pigtail, and remembered that I had been told that there was a Chinese cook in every camp.

'Is this the first camp?' I therefore asked.

'Yup!'

'Can you give me some tea?'

'Yup!' he repeated, and vanished into the tent whence he had come.

By the time I had tethered the slicker on the grassiest spot I could find, that boy had tea ready. He stared at me while I ate it, stared at me when I paid him for it, and stared at me when, having offered the slicker some bread and sugar in vain, I remounted him and set him on the homeward trail. I had not a watch with me. But it was evident from the position of the sun that we had very little daylight left for the return ride. Dusk, indeed, came on just as we reached the other side of the pass, with a mountain side still to descend. Dusk and an exceedingly cold wind—in the face of which that corkscrew trail seemed doubly steep. It was one of those occasions when vowing candles to one's patron saint might have added to one's peace of mind. But I have no patron saint and could but give the reins to the slicker, and he rewarded me for my trust by not falling down till we had actually accomplished the descent and were on the pebbled beach. Then, in the pitch-dark night, we both rolled over together. A match, lighted with difficulty, revealed the fact that neither of us was injured; and so, very steadily and cautiously, we moved on to the chalet, where we arrived to find dinner finished. But we had seen splendid things, the slicker and I.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE FRUIT-LANDS OF LAKE WINDERMERE

It would have been harder to leave the Rockies if I had not been bound for the Selkirks, which have this advantage over the Rockies, that they are perhaps less known. That part I was bound for is, indeed, not known at all to tourists, and very little known to anybody. The known part of the range lies round Glacier House, and includes Mount Abbott, the Great Illecillewaet Glacier, Mount Sir Donald, etc., which high places the railway has now made accessible for tourists who can climb. The part I was to see lies to the south-east, at the head of the Columbia Valley, and is at present a hundred miles from the nearest railway station.

First of all I took train to Golden. If you take a map of Canada and follow the trans-continental line westward, you will see that it emerges from the Rockies at Golden. Golden is a little mining town lying in the Columbia Valley, with the Rockies on one side of it and the Selkirks on the other. It was chiefly to see this valley—one of the most fertile in British Columbia, but at present unopened—that I got out at Golden with a friend. An excursion into the Selkirks was to depend upon the time at our disposal. We had been told that near Lake Windermere, at a place called Wilmer, there was a great irrigation scheme in progress, which would shortly result in 60,000 acres of dry belt-land being ready for fruit-farming. This, when the rail from Kamloops to Golden was completed, would make the Columbia Valley as famous for its fruit as the Okanagan. We both wanted to see it. My friend wanted to buy land. The problem was how to get up the valley.

THE DEVIL'S FINGERS. ROCKY MOUNTAINS.
THE DEVIL'S FINGERS. ROCKY MOUNTAINS.

2. This way was by river-boat—a delightful trip. But there were one or two objections to it. The water of the Columbia was very low at this time of the year, the sand-banks were numerous, and the boat had gone up some days before and nobody knew when it would get down again. We gave up the boat.

3. The third way, which we decided should be ours, was to go up in the only motor which Golden possessed. This would cost fifty dollars, but the journey there would only take about seven hours. When we had decided upon this, we went to the proprietor of the motor and found that the car was already out for an indefinite number of days.

4. This way was to walk the eighty miles—a plan I favoured and tried on the way back, as I shall describe. But my friend could not fancy it. Statelier than myself, he had to carry five more stones with him.

5. This was the way we took. We hired a two-horse rig which undertook to do the journey in the same time as the stage—but for twenty dollars apiece instead of five.

We started from Golden on a Monday morning in the two-horse rig, driven by a young American. He had been in the United States navy, and also in Alberta, farming, but he had had no luck with his farm, having started with too small a capital to tide over the two bad seasons which he had met there. He told us that he found Canada very similar to the States—neither much better nor worse; and he took his own luck there philosophically. He seemed to me altogether a capable man, whose fortune might have been all the other way. Anyway he drove excellently and was not a grumbler, like the American ex-sailor I met at Regina.

Nothing could have been more beautiful than the late September morning when we started out of Golden. A spreading village of pretty poplar-lined avenues and pleasant bungalows, Golden explained its own name as we went. The wooded hills on either side were all splashed with autumn yellows, and the sun, striking down through a grove of silver poplars which shuts off the south end of the village, made it all seem shot with gold. It is a mining village, but compared with the usual mining village of Great Britain it seemed as Eden to the Inferno.

Coming out of it we struck what is the dominant scenery of the valley—the blue Columbia winding in and out, sometimes wooded to its brim, sometimes sweeping over into open marshland, but always with the hills lightly wooded, facing one another across it, and behind them the white peaks hung with snow. At every mile or two a silvery creek, sometimes a mere ribbon of water, sometimes almost a river, rushed down to join the Columbia below; by the side of these creeks mostly would be the cleared land which small ranchers had settled, and where they had gone on living presumably on what they could grow off their own places, since the chances of reaching a market became obviously more difficult at every mile. Every wind of the road—and it mostly follows the river—gave views that were always changing and beautiful.

It was on the second day of our driving that the appearance of the valley grew different. The creeks became rarer; the soil drier. Instead of silver poplars rising among a tangled underbush, there were now jack-pines growing out of a burnt-up sward. We might have been going through some English park in the south country, and some one had evidently thought this before, for a man we met driving told us that this part of the valley was known as the Park. Passing through it we came at last to the real dry belt. Those who know the Okanagan would no doubt find it less strange, but it amazed me to find a country among these mountains almost Egyptian in its colouring and texture. Drier and drier became the soil; the trees became sparser and sparser; there was now no underwood at all. The straight firs rose clear out of sandy hills and hollows. Sandy they might appear, but this was not sand in the vulgar sense. It was glacial silt—bottomless drifts of powdered clay that has slipped down from the mountains and piled and sloped itself into 'benches' above the river.

We had to cross the river to get to Wilmer, which is the headquarters of the irrigation. Headquarters sounds imposing; and in a few years, doubtless, Wilmer will be imposing, but at present it consists of a few shacks, two small stores, a dirty little hotel (in the bar of which a man was shot the day after we left), and one presiding genius who has made Wilmer what it is and also what it will be shortly. Need I say that it was a Scot who years ago saw the far-reaching value of this land, conceived the idea of irrigating it, and personally superintended the carrying out of his conception? I don't know that I need. I came to the conclusion before I left Canada that Scots, more than any other race, were at the bottom, and generally also at the top, of most of the enterprises that were being carried out there. No one talks of the Scotticisation of Canada. Perhaps Scots do not proselytise. Perhaps they do not find any other people worthy of being taken into their community. They prefer to remain an international oligarchy, managing others but not admitting them to equal rights. They effect their intentions by usually working alone and always sticking together. A paradoxical people. It is amazing to think that at the beginning of the eighteenth century the Scottish Highlander was regarded by the average Englishman in much the same light as we now regard the Hottentot or the Andaman Islander, a hopelessly idle and uncouthly impossible person, destined to remain a barbarian for ever. Dis aliter visum. The Highlander now directs the Empire, distinguishing himself in that respect even more than his Lowland brother. Yet only two hundred years have passed since he was outside the pale.

My friend knew Mr. Randolph Bruce, the Highlander who presides over the Columbia Valley Irrigation Works, and will, it seems to me, rank as one of the many makers of Canada, and Mr. Bruce most hospitably put us up while we were in Wilmer, and showed us what he has done and what he means to do. What he means to do is to create a town on the shores of Lake Windermere, and he drove us down there to show us the lake, which is not the least like its English original, but very beautiful nevertheless, lying as it does clear and still among the sand-hills, a belt of autumn-tinted trees around it, and, above, the hills and the snows. It looked like some African lake stretched at the feet of the Mountains of the Moon. It looked as if it might lie thus for centuries, silent and untouched by the hands of men. But it was a Canadian lake, and though it might seem to be at the very back of the world, it was shortly to have a town built on its shores. Mr. Bruce showed us the town site, the hotel site, the site of the bowling-green and the polo ground. I rather think he showed us the race-course that was going to be. I saw it all the more clearly because Mr. Bruce also showed us the work already actually accomplished—the canals and ditches that brought the upper mountain lakes down on to the benches of friable clay that were to grow the apples we shall eat in England a few years hence. It is all extraordinarily interesting, seeing this town of the future and these fruit-lands of the future—of which my friend bought twenty acres, which were to be named after him. The Columbia River ran just below the bench-land he bought, and I wished I had some capital handy that I might buy the adjoining plot, that I might also grow fruit there and have a portion of the fair Dominion named after me. If the Windermere race-course had already been in existence, and a race being run, I should have backed one of the horses against all my principles, and laid out the proceeds in a fruit-farm.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE SELKIRKS—A GRIZZLY-BEAR COUNTRY

Behind Wilmer lies a part of the Selkirks which is known only to a few ranchers in the neighbourhood, and is scarcely accessible except from this point. We had spent two days in the neighbourhood of Lake Windermere, and on the third, though each of us was booked to be hundreds of miles further on our way by the end of the week, and heaven only knew how we were even going to reach Golden again, for we had let the rig go back and the boat was reported stuck somewhere on the Columbia River, we neither of us could resist an offer that was made us of an opportunity to climb Iron Top Mountain, which was somewhere at the back of this alluring country.

The offer came from a Mr. Starboard. In Canada you will sometimes find, several hundreds of miles from civilisation, some strenuous and capable man whom you would think civilisation needed and would require. But the wilds in Canada are more important. Mr. Starboard had come to these parts originally as a prospector and miner, but the mine he had come to had shut down—not for lack of silver and lead in it, but for lack of transport facilities; whereupon Mr. Starboard, fascinated by one of these valleys, had started horse-breeding there, occupying what time was left from clearing his land in making roads through the mountains and hunting big game. Dropping in at Mr. Bruce's casually one morning, he asked us if we should like to see the best view he knew of in the Selkirks. We said we should; and each, equipped with a toothbrush and a comb, was driven out to Starboard's ranch for lunch.

Travelling in the remoter parts of Canada gives you strange table companions. You never know quite what company you will meet, though you can generally count upon its being interesting. While we were being driven up the Columbia Valley a few days before, we had heard from various homesteaders that there was 'a big German bug' staying up in the mountains with his friends, trying for bear. 'They call him the Land Crab,' our informant would usually add for further elucidation of the big bug's official position. On arriving at Mr. Starboard's ranch we found that the big bug in question was, in the commoner prose of Europe, the Landgraf of Hesse with two equerries and a small retinue. For a motley collection, the party that sat down to lunch that day in the chief room of Starboard's ranch would be difficult to beat. There was the Landgraf himself and his German companions, a well-known Canadian official, three valets—these all neatly dressed—Mrs. Starboard quite wonderfully frocked, as the fashion papers say, Mr. Starboard in ranching costume, and ourselves who had slept in our clothes for several days. The waiters were a Japanese and a Chinese. We fed off bear, shot by one of the Germans, who had been most successful in their hunting both of bear and goat.

Bear, by the way, was only one among other delicacies. Its taste is rather like that of Christmas beef stewed in the gravy of a goose. Vegetarians would not care about it; but after living on little else for two days I can answer for its being both appetising and sustaining, particularly in high altitudes. After lunch, four of us, Mr. Starboard, the railway man, my friend, and myself started for Iron Top Mountain, which lay seventeen miles off along a trail that rose steeply most of the way. The ponies were excellent ones, better even than the slicker. Mr. Starboard had specially picked them, because he wanted to see if they could be got to carry us to the top of the mountain, a little over ten thousand feet. He had never taken ponies as high before, and doubted if the test had ever been made in Canada, though I fancy ponies have done as much or more in the Himalayas.

We did fourteen miles that afternoon, following at first the bank of a blue foaming stream, then turning eastward up a steeper valley through which a smaller stream flowed. The trail was far better than many roads in French Canada or on the prairie, and had been constructed by Mr. Starboard himself to provide access to a silver and lead mine which had been shut down for some time. It seemed extraordinary that in a country so wild and remote there should be any trail at all, but miners go anywhere. A man who has to find his way into the earth makes no difficulty about finding his way across it.

It was a day, half sunshine and half mist, and the mountains would sometimes be shut entirely in shrouds of vapour, sometimes would reveal slanted white tops cut off in mid-air by the fog below, sometimes would clear altogether, so that one could see everything on them, from the snowslides down which the grizzlies travel to the narrow tracks of the goats. As we mounted, the valley grew steeper and steeper, and the trail wound more and more. We passed one place where, earlier in the year, there had been a terrific slide of snow half a mile in width. The huge firs still lay where they had fallen, shattered and splintered before it. Half-way down, the avalanche had met a great pinnacle of rock that had stood the shock unmoved, and caused the snow to part to left and to right, where it had hewn two lanes of almost equal breadth through the trees. It was just near here that Mr. Starboard showed me a grizzly's track, and told me that he had seen no less than seventeen of these bears in the last fortnight. He said that their numbers were increasing yearly in that neighbourhood. A little later a porcupine crossed the trail ahead of us, and lurched unwieldily into the undergrowth. The trees grew close together all the way, except where we passed a great stretch of mountainside where a forest fire had raged, and even there the scorched trunks still stood, gibbeted skeletons of trees.

We put up for the night in a deserted mining camp, almost a village it was, with wooden shacks likely to be used again when the Kamloops to Golden Railway is completed and it is worth while getting the stuff out of the mine.

Up there it had begun to freeze hard, but a big fire and much bear, which the railway man fried over it with skill, kept us warm enough till we went to bed under many blankets in one of the shacks.

It was bitterly chill—the start in the early morning—after a breakfast of cold bear; and very soon after we set out we got into snow, and the trees ceased, and the ponies' flanks began to heave steadily. The morning was as bright as it was cold, however, and Mount Farnham, shaped like a chimney-pot, glittered right over us on the left. I remarked to Mr. Starboard what a nasty mountain it looked for climbing purposes, whereupon he astonished me by saying he had been up it.

'You went up to see if it could be done?' I said, thinking I had struck a keen climber in the European sense of the word.

'No,' said Mr. Starboard simply; 'you would not catch me going up a place like that for the climb. I went there because I thought there was silver and lead there.'

The ponies were now beginning to show their respective stamina, two of them going right ahead, and the one that carried my friend getting slower and slower. We had got by this time into a sort of rocky amphitheatre where the snow lay thicker, and just as I passed under a little cascade congealed into fantastic icicles as it spouted from a cleft, I heard a noise in my rear, and turned to see my friend and his pony doing Catherine wheels in the snow together. Luckily they fell—and rolled—softly and rose uninjured; but very soon after that the ponies had to be left. We turned them loose on a platform of rock which was, Mr. Starboard said, just short of ten thousand feet up. Only a few hundred more remained to be done, which we accomplished on foot through knee-deep snow, gaining the summit just in time.