swearing across the
illimitable levels for all the world as though it were a grown-up
Christian centre.

All the new towns have their own wants to consider, and the first of
these is a railway. If the town is on a line already, then a new line to
tap the back country; but at all costs a line. For this it will sell its
corrupted soul, and then be very indignant because the railway before
which it has grovelled rides rough-shod over the place.

Each new town believes itself to be a possible Winnipeg until the
glamour of the thing is a little worn off, and the local paper, sliding
down the pole of Pride with the hind legs of despair, says defiantly:
'At least, a veterinary surgeon and a drug store would meet with
encouragement in our midst, and it is a fact that five new buildings
have been erected in our midst since the spring.' From a distance
nothing is easier than to smile at this sort of thing, but he must have
a cool head who can keep his pulse level when just such a wildcat
town--ten houses, two churches, and a line of rails--gets 'on the boom,'
The reader at home says, 'Yes, but it's all a lie.' It may be, but--did
men lie about Denver, Leadville, Ballarat, Broken Hill, Portland, or
Winnipeg twenty years ago--or Adelaide when town lots went begging
within the memory of middle-aged men? Did they lie about Vancouver six
years since, or Creede not twenty months gone? Hardly; and it is just
this knowledge that leads the passer-by to give ear to the wildest
statements of the wildest towns. Anything is possible, especially among
the Rockies where the minerals lie over and above the mining towns, the
centres of ranching country, and the supply towns to the farming
districts. There are literally scores upon scores of lakelets in the
hills, buried in woods now, that before twenty years are run will be
crowded summer resorts. You in England have no idea of what 'summering'
means in the States, and less of the amount of money that is spent on
the yearly holiday. People have no more than just begun to discover the
place called the Banff Hot Springs, two days west of Winnipeg.[1] In a
little time they will know half-a-dozen spots not a day's ride from
Montreal, and it is along that line that money will be made. In those
days, too, wheat will be grown for the English market four hundred miles
north of the present fields on the west side; and British Columbia,
perhaps the loveliest land in the world next to New Zealand, will ha