conversation of the hammer on the nail-head, next week the implement
warehouse, the tent hotel, the little cluster of homes. In England it
takes a bishop to make a city, but here the nucleus needed is a wheat
elevator, red against the setting sun.

The ploughs that we saw in Winnipeg are at work here among the buffalo
bones and the spring anemones. As day breaks we catch a glimpse of a
sunbonneted mother and her three little kiddies. An ox is their rude
coadjutor, and through the flower-sod they cut their first furrow. It is
the beginning of a new home. Involuntarily one's mind jumps to the
crowded cities of the Old World with their pale-cheeked children and
fetid alleyways. Surely in bringing the workless man of the Old World to
the manless work of the New, the Canadian Government and the
transportation companies are doing a bit of God's work.

Half way between Winnipeg and the Pacific we reach Calgary, breezy,
buoyant Calgary, the commercial metropolis of the foothills, already a
busy mart and predestined to be the distributing point for many
railroads. The biggest man-made thing in Calgary is the C.P.R.
irrigation works, the largest on this continent. The area included in
the irrigation block is twice as big as the Island of Porto Rico and
one-eighth the size of England and Wales; and the ultimate expenditure
on the undertaking will reach the five million mark.

Calgary is the centre of a country literally flowing with milk and honey
and fat things. The oil-fields of Pincher Creek, with their rich promise
of becoming a second Pennsylvania, are contiguous to the city. The
winter wheat grown in Southern Alberta was awarded first prize and gold
medal at the World's Fair in Oregon in 1905. The hackney carriage horses
which took first prize at the last Montreal and New York horse-fairs