ng winters the post
was as isolated as an oasis in the Sahara.

That old life was lonely and primitive, but it had its compensating
balance of bright sun, wild animal life, and an air as vivid and virile
as ever stirred the veins of man. Sometimes the still, bright cold was
broken by a terrific storm, which ravaged, smothered, and entombed the
stray traveller in ravines of death. That was in winter; but in
summer, what had been called, fifty years ago, an alkali desert was an
everlasting stretch of untilled soil, with unsown crops, and here
and there herds of buffalo, which were stalked by alert Red Indians,
half-breeds, and white pioneer hunters.

The stories in 'Pierre and His People' were true to the life of that
time; the incidents in 'The World for Sale', and the whole narrative,
are true to the life of a very few years ago. Railways have pierced
and opened up lonely regions of the Sagalae, and there are two thriving
towns where, in the days of Pierre, only stood a Hudson's Bay Company's
post with its store. Now, as far as eye can see, vast fields of grain
greet the eye, and houses and barns speckle the greenish brown or Tuscan
yellow of the crop-covered lands, while towns like Lebanon and Manitou
provide for the modern settler all the modern conveniences which science
has given to civilized municipalities. Today the motor-car and the
telephone are as common in such places as they are in a thriving town
of the United Kingdom. After the first few days of settlement two things
always appear--a school-house and a church. Probably there is no country
in the world where elementary education commands the devotion and
the cash of the people as in English Canada; that is why the towns of
Lebanon and Manitou had from the first divergent views. Lebanon
was English, progressive, and brazenly modern; Manitou was slow,
reactionary, more or less indifferent to education, and strenuously
Catholic, and was thus opposed to the militant Protestantism of Lebanon.

It was my idea to picture a situation in the big new West where destiny
is being worked out in the making of a nation and the peopling of the
wastes. I selected a very modern and unusual type of man as the central
figure of my story. He was highly educated, well born, and carefully
brought up. He possessed all the best elements of a young man in a new
country--intelligent self-dependence, skill, daring, vision. He had an
original turn of mind, and, as men are obliged to d