already been wearing wolf and coon
skin coats. In the great cities which work the year round,
carriage--shops exhibited one or two seductive nickel-plated sledges, as
a hint; for the sleigh is 'the chariot at hand here of Love.' In the
country the farmhouses were stacking up their wood-piles within reach of
the kitchen door, and taking down the fly-screens, (One leaves these
on, as a rule, till the double windows are brought up from the cellar,
and one has to hunt all over the house for missing screws.) Sometimes
one saw a few flashing lengths of new stovepipe in a backyard, and
pitied the owner. There is no humour in the old, bitter-true stovepipe
jests of the comic papers.

But the railways--the wonderful railways--told the winter's tale most
emphatically. The thirty-ton coal cars were moving over three thousand
miles of track. They grunted and lurched against each other in the
switch-yards, or thumped past statelily at midnight on their way to
provident housekeepers of the prairie towns. It was not a clear way
either; for the bacon, the lard, the apples, the butter, and the cheese,
in beautiful whitewood barrels, were rolling eastwards toward the
steamers before the wheat should descend on them. That is the fifth act
of the great Year-Play for which the stage must be cleared. On scores of
congested sidings lay huge girders, rolled beams, limbs, and boxes of
rivets, once intended for the late Quebec Bridge--now so much mere
obstruction--and the victuals had to pick their way through 'em; and
behind the victuals was the lumber--clean wood out of the
mountains--logs, planks, clapboards, and laths, for which we pay such
sinful prices in England--all seeking the sea. There was housing, food,
and fuel for millions, on wheels together, and never a grain yet shifted
of the real staple which men for five hundred miles were threshing out
in heaps as high as fifty-pound villas.

Add to this, that the railways were concerned for their own new
developments--double-trackings, loops, cutoffs, taps, and feeder lines,
and great swoops out into untouched lands soon to be filled with men. So
the construction, ballast, and material trains, the grading machines,
the wrecking cars with their camel-like sneering cranes--the whole plant
of a new civilisation--had to find room somewhere in the general rally
before Nature cried, 'Lay off!'

Does any one remember that joyful strong confidence after the war, when
it seemed that, at last, Sou