The New North by Agnes Deans Cameron
page 35 of 324 (10%)
page 35 of 324 (10%)
![]() | ![]() |
|
|
Kennedy's son, who, tradition says, was struck by lightning when he was
just forgetting to be a boy and beginning to be a man. Dwarfed in mind and body, he makes a mild-flavoured pocket-edition of Quilp. The roads are a quagmire. The querulous voice of the man who lost his camera claims our attention. "I thought I would be able to get out and run behind and pick flowers." Turning and introducing ourselves, we find the troubled one to be an English doctor going north off his own bat with the idea of founding a hospital for sick Indians on the Arctic Circle. [Illustration: Irrigation Ditch, Calgary, Alberta] The girlish figure of a teacher struggling through the awful mud in gum-boots indicates that we have not travelled beyond the range of the little red schoolhouse. Stray wee figures splashing their way schoolward look dreary enough, and I seem to hear the monotonous drone of "seven times nine," "the mountains of Asia," "the Tudor sovereigns with dates of accession," and other things appertaining to "that imperial palace whence I came." All the summer afterwards, when mosquitoes are plenty and food scarce, a backward thought to this teacher making muddy tracks toward the well of English undefiled, brings pleased content. [Illustration: A Waldorf-Astoria on the Prairie's Edge] At noon it clears, and as we "make tea" at Sturgeon Creek (the Namao Sepee of the Indians), the first of the "stopping-places" or Waldorf-Astorias of the wilderness, the Doctor has his will and gathers violets, moccasin flowers, and the purple _dodecatheon_. As we pass Lily Lake he remarks, "This reminds me of the Duke of Norfolk's place at |
|


