How foreign to an English eye was the flat, hedgeless landscape! with
its vast satin-smooth fields of bluish-green wheat; its farmhouses with
their ploughed fireguards and shelter-belts of young trees; its rare
villages, each stretching in one long straggling line of wooden houses
along the level earth; its scattered, treeless lakes, from which the
duck rose as the train passed! Was it this mere foreignness, this
likeness in difference, that made it strike so sharply, with such a
pleasant pungency on Elizabeth's senses? Or was it something else--some
perception of an opening future, not only for Canada but for herself,
mingling with the broad light, the keen air, the lovely strangeness of
the scene?

Yet she scarcely spoke to Arthur Delaine, with whom one might have
supposed this hidden feeling connected. She was indeed aware of him all
the time. She watched him secretly; watching herself, too, in the
characteristic modern way. But outwardly she was absorbed in talking
with the guests.

The Chief Justice, roundly modelled, with a pink ball of a face set in
white hair, had been half a century in Canada, and had watched the
Northwest grow from babyhood. He had passed his seventieth year, but
Elizabeth noticed in the old men of Canada a strained expectancy, a
buoyant hope, scarcely inferior to that of the younger generation. There
was in Sir Michael's talk no hint of a Nunc Dimittis; rather a
passionate regret that life was ebbing, and the veil falling over a
national spectacle so enthralling, so dramatic.

"Before this century is out we shall be a people of eighty millions, and
within measurable time this plain of a thousand miles from here to the