as the hunter, treading them once or
twice perhaps in a century. Dreamily her mind contrasted them with the
Alps, where from all time man has laboured and sheltered, blending his
life, his births and deaths, his loves and hates with the glaciers and
the forests, wresting his food from the valleys, creeping height over
height to the snow line, writing his will on the country, so that in our
thought of it he stands first, and Nature second. The Swiss mountains
and streams breathe a "mighty voice," lent to them by the free passion
and aspiration of man; they are interfused and interwoven forever with
human fate. But in the Rockies and the Selkirks man counts for nothing
in their past; and, except as wayfarer and playfellow, it is probable
that he will count for nothing in their future. They will never be the
familiar companions of his work and prayer and love; a couple of
railways, indeed, will soon be driving through them, linking the life of
the prairies to the life of the Pacific; but, except for this conquest
of them as barriers in his path, when his summer camps in them are
struck, they, sheeted in a winter inaccessible and superb, know him and
his puny deeds no more, till again the lakes melt and the trees bud.
This it is that gives them their strange majesty, and clothes their
brief summer, their laughing fields of flowers, their thickets of red
raspberry and slopes of strawberry, their infinity of gleaming lakes and
foaming rivers--rivers that turn no mill and light no town--with a
charm, half magical, half mocking.

And yet, though the travelled intelligence made comparisons of this
kind, it was not with the mountains that Elizabeth's deepest mind was
busy. She took really keener note of the railway itself, and its
appurtenances. For here man had expressed himself; had pitched his
battle with a fierce nature and won it; as no doubt he will win other
similar battles in the coming years. Through Anderson this battle had
become real to her. She looked eagerly at the construction camps in the
pass; at the new line that is soon to supersede the old; at the bridges
and tunnels and snow-sheds, by which contriving man had made his purpose
prevail over the physical forces of this wild world. The great railway
spoke to her in terms of human life; and because she had known Anderson
she understood its message.

Secretly and sorely her thoughts clung to him. Just as, insensibly, her
vision of Canada had changed, so had her v