he busy people of the churches with their philanthropies, their
religious activities, striving to gather into their several folds
the waifs and strays that came stumbling into their city from all
lands--all alike, unaware of the growing danger area in their young
city, forgot the foreign colony, its problems and its needs.

Meantime, summer followed winter, and winter summer, the months and
years went on while the foreign colony grew in numbers and more
slowly in wealth. More slowly in wealth, because as an individual
member grew in wealth he departed from the colony and went out to
make an independent home for himself in one of the farming colonies
which the Government was establishing in some of the more barren and
forbidding sections of the country; or it may be, loving the city and
its ways of business, he rapidly sloughed off with his foreign clothes
his foreign speech and manner of life, and his foreign ideals as well,
and became a Canadian citizen, distinguished from his cosmopolitan
fellow citizen only by the slight difficulty he displayed with some
of the consonants of the language.

Such a man was Simon Ketzel. Simon was by trade a carpenter, but he
had received in the old land a good educational foundation; he had,
moreover, a shrewd head for affairs, and so he turned his energies
to business, and with conspicuous success. For in addition to all
his excellent qualities, Simon possessed as the most valuable part
of his equipment a tidy, thrifty wife, who saved what her husband
earned and kept guard over him on feast days, saved and kept guard
so faithfully that before long Simon came to see the wisdom of her
policy and became himself a shrewd and sober and well-doing
Canadian, able to hold his own with the best of them.

His sobriety and steadiness Simon owed mostly to his thrifty wife,
but his rapid transformation into Canadian citizenship he owed
chiefly to his little daughter Margaret. It was Margaret that
taught him his English, as she conned over her lessons with him
in the evenings. It was Margaret who carried home from the little
Methodist mission near by, the illustrated paper and the library
book, and thus set him a-reading. It was Margaret that brought both
Simon and Lena, his wife, to the social gathering of the Sunday
School and of the church. It was thus to little Margaret that the
Ketzels owed their introduction to Canadian life and manners, and to
the finer sides of Canadian religion. And thr