y seen Thomas
Douglas, Earl of Selkirk, who formulated the scheme of populating the
prairies of the North-West with poverty-stricken and down-trodden
tenants from older lands, many of whom lie in the old grave-yard of the
Kildonan settlement on the Red River of the North, a few miles from the
City of Winnipeg. Their descendants with their Scotch thrift form the
backbone of that progressive province of such magnificent possibilities.
Their weary journeys overland, toilsome _portages_ and struggles with
want and isolation are now mere matters of history, for the overflow
population of the crowded centres of Europe are carried in a few days
from sea to sea with every possible convenience and even luxury. The
great Canadian transcontinental line has spanned the valleys and crossed
the mountains, literally opening up a highway for the thousands who from
the ends of the earth are yearly crowding into these vast fertile plains
and sub-arctic gold fields.

Franklin lies in an unknown grave among Northern snows, lost in his
attempt, at the age of sixty, to find the North Pole. He was last seen
moored to an iceberg in Baffin's Bay, apparently waiting for a
favourable opportunity to begin work in what is known as the Middle Sea.
The problem of his fate long baffled discovery, although many an earnest
searching party, in the Polar twilight, has sought him in that region of
ice and snow, in a silence broken only by the howl of the arctic blast,
the scream of sea-fowl or the thundering report of an ice-floe breaking
away from the mainland.

One party sent out by the Hudson Bay Co. in 1853 found traces of the
expedition in some bits of metal and a silver plate engraved with the
name Franklin. Another, fitted out partly by Lady Franklin, and partly
by public subscription, and commanded by McClintock, afterwards Sir
Leopold McClintock, learned from an Eskimo woman that she had heard of a
party of men, whom it was said "fell down and died as they walked." With
the exception of these faint traces, their fate is still wrapped in
obscurity.

[Illustration]

INTERESTING SITES.

Few visitors to the city, as the Palace cars of the Canadian Pacific
Railway carry them into the mammoth station on Dalhousie Square, realize
the historic associations which cling around this spot. In the
magnificently equipped dining-room of the Company's Hotel, as delicacies
from the most distant parts of the earth are laid before the traveller,
he sh