The northbound train on the Northern Pacific Line was running away
behind her time. A Dakota blizzard had held her up for five hours,
and there was little chance of making time against a heavy wind
and a drifted rail. The train was crowded with passengers, all
impatient at the delay, as is usual with passengers. The most
restless, if not the most impatient, of those in the first-class
car was a foreign-looking gentleman, tall, dark, and with
military carriage. A grizzled moustache with ends waxed to a needle
point and an imperial accentuated his foreign military appearance.
At every pause the train made at the little wayside stations, this
gentleman became visibly more impatient, pulling out his watch,
consulting his time table, and cursing the delay.

Occasionally he glanced out through the window across the white
plain that stretched level to the horizon, specked here and there
by infrequent little black shacks and by huge stacks of straw half
buried in snow. Suddenly his attention was arrested by a trim line
of small buildings cosily ensconced behind a plantation of poplars
and Manitoba maples.

"What are those structures?" he enquired of his neighbour in careful
book English, and with slightly foreign accent.

"What? That bunch of buildings. That is a Mennonite village,"
was the reply.

"Mennonite! Ah!"

"Yes," replied his neighbour. "Dutch, or Russian, or something."