you any American books to lend me? I am very desirous of reading the "Spy." I intend

seem taken, is not one in which the original can berecognized at first sight-perhaps owing to the affected position and stud

ied air when he sat for it. I never saw a countenance

more composed and still, or more sweet and prepossessing, than his appeared. His hair was beginning to lose its

are most charming and fascinating; and if he is (as they say) a devil, he is certainly a merry one-nothing gloomy. His voice is low, and at first sounds affected."

The other account is by an English clergyman, in the autumn of 1822, also at Genoa :

"The first impression made upon me was this that Byron bore the least possible resemblance to any bust, portrait, or profile that I had ever seen. That of Mr. Murray's, from which most of the prints

which, it is said,

he was once so proud; and several gray hairs were seen, in spite of his anxiety to remove them. A slight color occasionally crossed his cheeks, and when I related an anecdote of a lady (Caroline Lamb) who said, I have often been very foolish, but never wicked' at hearing this a blush stole over his face, and he said, I believe her.' There was nothing eccentric in his manner; nothing beyond the level of ordinary clever men in his remarks or style of conversation."

This observer was a Mr. Johnson, and he was accompanied in his call by Aaron Burr, the American exile, who afterward is reported to have given Byron this valuable certificate, in talking with an English merchant at Gibraltar: "I am no judge of his merits as a poet; but by

Byron's Sword and Yataghan of Colonel Miller, as they hang in Chicago.

G-d, sir, he is every way a gentleman."

Blaquière visited Byron at Genoa in April, 1823, and also mentions his "few white hairs;" but adds, "His eyes retain all

their penetrating brilliancy, and that voice, with which you were so impressed at Venice, has lost nothing of its impressive tone and flexible quality." Such was the memorable Englishman who died for Greece.

I'

T was at Calgary that we suddenly and ungratefully abandoned the Canadian Pacific Railway which had carried us so comfortably twenty three hundred miles west from Montreal, and allowed the "Nippon" to go on its way to Banff, through the splendid Selkirk range, on to Vancouver without us while we waited for the train that was to take us down into southern Alberta. The train between Calgary and Macleod "runs" twice a week. I should say that it wanders uncertainly and slowly over the prairie in the direction of Fort Macleod twice a week, leaving Calgary at an absurd ly early hour, so as to have sufficient time to make its hundred miles before night should overtake it, and that it stops every now and then for apparently no reason what ever, and lingers at each little station as if it could not bear to leave it, and beside every water-tank as if the boiler would never be filled. In proportion to the amount of steam evolved, that boiler absorbed more water than any other engine-boiler I ever had any experience with. The frequent stoppage was rather trying, because this train had no such useless luxuries about it as Westinghouse air-brakes, and when the engineer would slow up trainmen would appear feverishly at each platform and grapple with the brakes and slue them around just as one sees a conductor on a cable-car do, and there would ensue much jolting and rattling of chains and the pro

longed, grinding squeak of rusty iron. But our slow locomotion gave us excellent opportunities of seeing the country, and when the train would stop we would go out on the platform or lean from the windows and look out over the finest grazing-land in the world, lying basking in the brilliant, hot sunshine, and wonder how long it would be before we would move on.

There were places which we passed where there were only a station, a watertank, an H. B. C. store, and a spick-andspan unmounted policeman standing very stiffly on the platform, and who had, as a rule, a very youthful and martial appearance in his solitary grandeur and who wore his forage-cap just a little farther over his ear than I had ever seen it worn before, and looked wistfully out of his young eyes at the puffing little train that would so soon disappear to the south and leave him to another three days and nights of solitude.

This immaculateness in the uniform of the British soldier, known as the Northwest Mounted Policeman, beyond Regina, always impressive, becomes doubly so in the careless, rough-and-tumble West. One would think that the example set by the Indian and the cow-boy and the rancher, in the way of negligé attire, would be too much to withstand, and that officers would forget caste distinctions and fraternize with the privates out of sheer loneliness and need of human companionship; but the discipline of the English army is maintained in all its integrity at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, and the "eyes r-right!" and "attention!" are as grim as at Aldershot, and the men as well uniformed and disciplined as though they were under the eye of General Lord Wolseley himself.

When we reached Fort Macleod we

were more than ever impressed by this. There were long, neat rows of officers' quarters, and a big guard-room, and the Union Jack floating from the big mast, and privates to be seen in brilliant tunics and "pill-boxes," or sometimes, as a concession to the fierceness of the sun, a sombrero tied on under the short back-hair with a string, just as the Harrow boys wear their sailor-hats.

And when we had left Fort Macleod and driven thirty-five miles straight west over the prairie, with the Rockies always ahead of us, radiant in the afternoon sun, and reached the little detachment where we were to spend three months, we found the same thing thereorder and discipline, in miniature it is true, but as rigid and as effective as if it had to do with a thousand men instead of six or eight.

Perhaps it is this untir

Photo by Steele & Co., Winnipeg.

ing vigilance and discipline that makes the Northwest Mounted Police such a power in the country over which it is scatteredthat is, from Regina to the Rockies, south to the international boundary line, and

north to Edmonton and Prince Albert. Or more probably it is because a great many of its one thousand men are gentlemen by birth and education, and who, through some fault of their own, or fate, or circumstances, have lost their birthright

and the opportunity of using their education. So they become machines of the Canadian Government, and the Queen, through her GovernorGeneral acting through his Minister of the Interior by way of the Commissioner at Regina, gives him a regimental number and a coat and a LeeMetford rifle and fifty cents a day to start with, and he studies his Manual

of English boys who, in addition to being common soldiers, are servants for the officers, and the only clew to whose identity is the arrival once in six months or so of a heavily crested letter-the crest of the family which has borne it for generations, not the kind of crest one can have made at Tiffany's or Dempsey & Carroll's. Or you will hear that the orderly driving the trap is the son of a man who holds a most prominent and responsible position in Upper Canada. And they will tell you of even tragic things-of a private soldier

is the political discussions of the Liberals and Conservatives, whose election posters are in the shop-windows, and the bursts of patriotism toward the Queen and the talk of the young ranchers of their clubs in London as if they were only a mile away, and with the voice and accent one last heard there. At any rate, you feel in some mysterious, delightful way that you are in England without having crossed the Atlantic in a pitching crowded boat.

On Dominion Day one is more than ever impressed with the feeling that this is Eng