everything from painkiller to mining stock. Of late, he has been
selling real-estate, but the bottom has dropped out of this business.
For the future, he intends raising potatoes on the land instead of
prices. He has "cleaned up" eight thousand dollars in real-estate, but
he wishes me to understand he made this honestly by taking options on
property and selling before the options came due.

With remarkable precision of language, he explains how the slump in
real-estate is chiefly due to those large, didactic gentlemen of slow
conscience and insulting superior manner who come here by the trainload
and tell the North she is still a flapper, and that it is unbecoming of
her to do up her hair and lengthen her skirts, after which cheap and
unsolicited advice, they take themselves and their pestiferous money
homewards.

Their opinions are quoted from the Atlantic to the Pacific, which I
must know takes in Spruceville, till the bankers are seized with the
complaint known as cold feet--pest take them!--and "get orders from
headquarters" to close up all outstanding accounts. These banker
fellows, my informant says, lose their beauty sleep, but as far as he
can see, lose nothing else. A business man may be potentially rich and
yet be put into bankruptcy by a corporation, the spoils going to the
corporation, or its manager. There should be a law against elderly
wide-jawed financiers who prophesy hard times because, with them, the
wish is father to the thought. There is nothing in all the world they
desire so much in order that they may, by their phenomenal rates of
interest, pillage the country to their heart's satisfaction. So
gainful is their pursuit, my friend will not be at all surprised if, at
the last day, it is found that these tongue-lolling financiers have a
lien on heaven; indeed, he believes this to be inevitable. Owing to
the fact that we are unaccustomed to it, the process of thinking is a
somewhat painful one to us of Alberta, but it is wonderful what flashes
of illumination come to us sometimes.

To-day, the first train of cars has entered this place. It belongs to
the Canadian Northern Railway Company. For many years Edmonton was
known as the last house in the world. This, of course, was not
literally true, and it would be hard to state where or which is the
ultimate hearth-stone in this very good land of Canada, but assuredly
Edmonton was the last post-office and, until this year, the End of
Steel.