dds
which so many are now fighting. With no one to support her and little
Ned the old woman was forced to go out and scrub offices and to do a
day's work wherever it could be got, in order, as she said, "to get a
bit an' a sup an' a few rags to keep the boy in dacency."

Selkirk Avenue was not then the congested district that it is to-day.
Then happy homes, not many on the street, but each with a nice large
plot of ground and its own garden shaded with maple trees, covered the
district where now stores and offices and tenement blocks are trying to
shut out the sunshine. Never did a braver, more generous,
kinder-hearted people dwell together than those of North Winnipeg in
the good old days when each was known to all and all to each. The
hungry and the destitute never pleaded then in vain. Like the Green
Isle from which they sprung, "their doors opened wide to the poor and
the stranger"; like the land of their adoption, Canada, the broad and
free, their hands and purses were ever open to the call of charity.
Among them these two friendless ones found friends indeed. They lived
in a little home just east of where the Exhibition Buildings now stand.
A cleaner and neater one, though poorly furnished, could not be found
in all the city. On the walls were a few pictures, and the one Ned
loved best was that of Archbishop Machray, the great prelate who had
done so much for Western Canada in general and Winnipeg in particular.
Often he would sit for hours to hear Granny tell of the deeds of the
early pioneers in this great "Lone Land," and especially, so far as she
knew, those of the great Saint whom Ned was proud to claim as his hero.

Often on a summer's evening, when the darkness was beginning to fall,
and Granny had rested a little after her day's work, she and the child
would walk down towards the church. Not a handsome edifice, merely a
frame shell on a stone foundation. Not old and fragrant with ancient
memories, like the churches of the "Dear Isle" so far away, where tired
and weary workers, after long and dreary toil, in the evenings would
step in and reverently kneeling would lose sight of the world and its
weariness, in prayer and communion with God--a custom of the people
which gave them the strength and fortitude to bear a burden unknown to
the boys and girls of this Canada of ours. No, not grand and old and
magnificent, but still to these two sacred and hallowed because it was
God's House and theirs. They knelt on