And after it was all finished most satisfactorily you were bundled into a trap which had just come tearing down from the shack, driven recklessly by another agreeable young host, and so borne triumphantly up the two hundred yards between the tentingground and the dining-shack, as if the distance were too tremendous to be walked. And when you reached there you were ushered into a big room that was filled with long tables and a great many people who seemed to be having a very good time, and more young Englishmen would come around impressively and ask you how you took your coffee or tea and insist on serving you themselves. Sometimes one of them would tell you confidentially that he hoped you would like such and such a dish, because he had made it himself.

There was indeed something almost pathetic in the way those big young men thought of the comfort of their guests, and stayed up till all hours of the night and turned out at unearthly hours in the morning, and made the shacks pretty with all sorts of decorations and arranged for the pleasure and convenience of the women, even down to sending hot coffee to the tents while they were dressing in the morning. After luncheon, although it was very cold and a strong wind was blowing, we all went out to the polo-grounds and watched one enthusiastic polo-team completely use up another enthusiastic polo-team, and when that had been accomplished satisfactorily we went back to the shack, where dinner was presently served.

That evening there was a dance, and it was as ceremonious and enjoyable a function as if it had taken place in Park Lane. Young men whom you had only seen in "round-up" or polo clothes suddenly appeared in dress-suits and immaculate shirtfronts, and bore so little resemblance to their former selves that you felt that they ought to be reintroduced. And the young married women and girls bloomed forth in lownecked gowns and satin slippers and had their dance-cards, which were most properly got up, and had the familiar silk cord and pencil attachment, rapidly filled by the metamorphosed young gentlemen; and the band, which consisted of a violinist and a sergeant-banjoist from the nearest police detachment, played very good dance-music indeed, and alternated waltzes and two

steps beautifully. And there was a "sitting-out" room with Chinese lanterns and screens and things, and at twelve o'clock supper was served, and one felt just as one did at home, only with a queer difference. It was all so strange because it was all so familiar, and it would have seemed much more familiar if it had been more strange, which is rather paradoxical, but which everyone will easily understand. When you have thoroughly prepared your mind for very different things from any you have known, by recalling forcibly that there are one hundred thousand square miles of prairie about you and that you are one hundred and seventy miles from the nearest place that can by any stretch of imagination be called a city, and that the Rockies are close upon you to the left, and that this is a young country and a man who has been in it five years is an old settler, one is rather astonished at the well-bred people and at the daily mode of life which one naturally connects with the East and city life, and at the presence of a hundred trifles which one had carefully prepared one's self to do without.

And then at about half-past two, when everyone was properly tired and sleepy, the dance broke up, and the traps, which always seemed in some mysterious way to be standing around ready at any hour of the day or night, drew up to the door, and while the young women were in the dressing-room putting on their wraps, the young Englishmen and Canadians struck up"God Save the Queen," and sang it at the top of their young lungs and more fervently than I ever heard it sung before. It was a very fine sight, I thought-the bigbeamed shack, the walls covered with polo and hunting and racing trophies half shining in the faint light from the sputtering candles and lamps burning low in the brackets, and the straight, athletic young figures standing easily about. It seemed to me that the Queen would have been a very proud lady indeed if she could have heard that song and known that she had no more patriotic subjects than those careless, happy young ranchers so many thousands of miles away in that lonely land, who did not forget her even in their pleasures, and she would do well to stop going to Balmoral and Florence and the Isle of Wight and come over to Canada instead

and hint around until some of those young men invited her to a house-party. I am sure they would treat her nicely and that she would have a most delightful time.

The second and last day was to have been very exciting, with polo in the morning and gymkhana races in the afternoon, but when we woke up we saw what the wind and dark clouds of the day before had meant, for, although it was only September 11th, the ground was thickly powdered with snow, and the flakes were falling with an evident determination to keep it up for some time at least. So we dressed slowly and discontentedly, and the trap which had be sent down from the shack for us drew up with much forced gayety and dash, and we put on mournfully the raccoon-coats that had thoughtfully been sent with the trap and were carried back up to the shacks. There was much anxious consultation over the weather during the morning, and everyone felt greatly relieved when it cleared up in the early afternoon and it was decided to have the second polo match. It was very hard to give up seeing the gymkhana with the postilion and bending and the bucket and ball-races and the half-mile hurdles over four jumps, and all the rest of it, but one was very glad to see the polo match, which proved very "fast" for two quarters at least. It began to snow in the third, and by the fourth the ponies, racing and turning sharply on the wet, slippery grass, could hardly keep on their little feet, and one could with difficulty see the white khaki trousers and sweaters and make out the colored sashes of the riders as they dashed around in the thickly falling snow. The men looking on tramped up and down vigorously, and the women sat up in the traps immovable and very warm in the big raccoon-coats the men insisted on putting on them, except the fingers, which were so cold that it was hard work even to press the button of a kodak.

It was very difficult for the visiting stranger to decide whether the amiable hosts of this house-party were most amiable during the day when they were tearing around on polo-ponies and risking their necks to furnish excitement and pleasure and taxing their ingenuity to make everyone comfortable and happy, or in the evening when we gathered together in

the largest room of the shack and they gave us a very creditable music-hall performance. One was at a loss which to admire most, the temerity or the heroic self-sacrifice of these young men as they would arise diffidently in various parts of the room and sing "The Little Tin GeeGee " or " The Future Mrs. 'Awkins" or "Tommy Atkins" or "Life in a HalfBreed Shack." Some of them had voices, and some had not, but they all had the best intentions and a set determination to do what they could toward the general entertainment, and they were very much in earnest about it all and succeeded admirably. They gave us dialect songs and banjo solos and sleight-of-hand performances, and they did them all without having to be begged, and with only the modest and single desire to please. One hardly likes to think how their American cousins would have acted under similar circumstances. Most young Americans in such a case, I fancy, would have preferred death by slow torture to taking any share in such proceedings, even if they had been able to do so, which is highly improbable, for American youths, as a rule, do not know Grossmith's or Chevalier's or anybody else's songs, or funny anecdotes or sleight-of-hand tricks. They are much too blasé and busy and grownup for that sort of thing. And after the concert, as it was really the last night of the house-party, although a great number of the guests were compelled to stay over another twenty-four hours, some one got up and made a very complimentary speech on behalf of the eighty guests and thanked the North Fork Polo-team for the delightful time they had given them, and everybody cheered enthusiastically and put on their wraps with great regret.

When we started back a day later, there were six inches of snow on the ground and the cattle were lowing plaintively and "rustling" for grass, and the innumerable trails on the prairie were all obliterated. By the way, people speak carelessly of the "trackless prairie," as if they were telling the truth, whereas the prairies, at least those of northwest Canada, are cut up by so many tracks that one has continually to pick and choose from them.

It was so cold and the snow so deep that we sadly concluded that the summer had

upon us.

gone for good and that winter was actually That was because we did not yet fully appreciate a chinook wind. The chinook wind received its name from the Chinook Indians of the western coast, and it will spring up suddenly during the fall and winter and blow warmly down through the mountain passes and melt the deepest snow that ever was seen in an astonishingly short time. When one hears some of the stories they tell of the chinook-such as that of a certain young man who left Macleod to go thirty-five miles west in an open sleigh with a heavy snow on the ground, and by the time he was half way to his destination the runners were dragging and catching in the dry prairie grass -when one hears such accounts, one is inclined to believe that Baron Munchausen must have been in Alberta when he wrote that story of the horse who was inadvertently tied to a church-steeple owing to the depth of the snow, and that it was a chinook wind that came along during the night and melted it, leaving him suspended in air the next morning. And so in a few days a soft chinook wind sprang up and the prairie turned green again, and one lifted one's eyes, tired of the long level stretches of land, to the Rockies, standing dazzlingly white in the brilliant sunlight, with the fresh drifts of snow upon them, and in the clear air seeming so close that one could easily make out every shadowed hollow and the ridges of snow on the sides, like the marks left on a sandy beach when the tide goes

out.

One was very glad to get a good view of the mountains once more. They had been hidden for the greater part of the summer behind the dense clouds of smoke from very bad prairie-fires which we had had, and when these had quit burning the smoke from the worst forest fires that had been known in British Columbia for years came pouring across to us through the Crow's Nest and Kootenay Passes, enveloping the mountains in an impenetrable haze. There were days when the resinous odor of the burning pines, thirty-five miles away, was as distinct as if it had been only one, and the sunlight would filter in a sick, grayish yellow color through the rolling clouds of smoke above our heads. But once in awhile a strong wind would spring up and blow fiercely across the prairie and

the veil of smoke would slowly rise, like the drop-curtain of a theatre, and show the Rockies, with gleaming peaks and darkly purple, mysteriously shadowed slopes set like a scene at the Grand Opera for "William Tell." At night we would go up on a slight elevation of ground near our shack and from that vantage-ground could look across the level prairie and see through a field-glass, or even a good opera-glass, the burning mountain pines so far away and the bursts of sparks that would flame upward as some great tree would go crashing down. It made one think of Vesuvius or a gigantic pyrotechnic display all for one's own benefit, and I felt, as I sat up there in the cool darkness and solitude watching it all, just as I imagine King Ludwig felt as he sat alone in his theatre and watched the "Nibelungen Ring," or the "Flying Dutchman," or " Lohengrin." I even had a feeling of superiority over that prodigal king, for my entertainment was infinitely more costly than even his operatic stars and corps de ballet and orchestra could have been.

The prairie fires last summer were particularly inconvenient, for they not only obscured the mountains for weeks together, which I took as a personal grievance, but they also chose to burn up Crow's Nest Pass, which had been about decided upon as the camping-place for our two weeks' vacation. So we had to make a second choice, and one day we started off in the trap and on horseback for the Kootenay Pass, forty-five miles away, and I do not think the Crow's Nest Pass was regretted once during our two weeks' camping on the edge of the second Kootenay Lake. I say the second Kootenay Lake, because there is a chain of them forty-five miles long, extending through the mountains into British Columbia, and each one more beautiful than the one before. They lie, deep and clear, shut in by the mountains which rise from 5,000 to 8,000 feet above them on all sides, and which draw together, leaving only a narrow, tossing water-way into the next lake, where they again expand, and so on until one leaves Alberta behind and finds himself over the boundary in British Columbia. But I fancy no one has ever tried to go through on the lakes, for the high mountains on each side make a regular funnel through which the wind sweeps

so furiously that any craft small enough to get through from one lake to the next would be capsized by it. There were days when even out in the open lake where we camped the waves were so high that we could not venture out in our little canvas canoe, which was brought with the tents and stores and kit-bags and saddles and oats and the hundred other necessaries, and which could be conveniently broken into little bits and stuffed in the canvas covering until it looked like a cricket-bag with the bats in it.

The country around the Kootenay Lakes is a sort of happy lotus land. There was a dreamy heat and quiet about it, a delicious sense of utter solitude, and a glimpse of a happy existence independent of most of the things which one usually thinks of as being essential to happiness, which is good for one to experience. From that place the world and all its pleasures seemed as far off as though one were looking at them through the wrong end of an opera-glass. The feeling began to grow on us at the outset of the long, lazy journey, when we drove straight west over the prairie, with the horses going in their steady, easy trot and the trap swaying gently on the thick prairie-grass and a misty blue and white mountain-peak in the distance to guide our course by. Ranches and all the familiar places we had known melted away behind us, and we wound higher and higher up among the foot-hills, with glimpses downward of softly blended shades of green, or upward to snowy mountains, or ahead the glint of yellowed grass ready to be cut. And when we reached the lake, lying blue and warm and still under the brilliant sun, and breathed in the spicy odor of the pines and realized that this undiscovered country was all ours, we felt very much like pitching our tents there for good. Of course there would have been some difficulty about living there in the winter, but no one troubled about that just then. I do not think, however, the beauty of the lake appealed to some as much as the magnificent fishing. A salmon-trout fourteen and a half pounds in weight was an object much more worthy of contemplation to some of us than the mountains around. Fortunately the two things could be combined. One could start out in the canoe with the trolling-line, and then if the fish did not bite the trip could be converted into an exploration party. It is very amusing to

name horses and gold-mines, but it is even more unique to discover for yourself a mountain 8,000 feet high, or a cascade almost as big as the Falls of Lodore, and reflect that you can christen them. Of course, you cannot be sure that the names you give them will go down to posterity, but there is a great deal of satisfaction in merely having done it, and, of course, you can always magnificently refer to them after the manner you have decided upon.

Sometimes as we rowed from one lake into the next we would come unexpectedly upon sheltered coves where the clear, green water slipped over a sandy bottom as hard and smooth as asphalt, and we would row frantically back to camp for bathing-suits to try it. And sometimes when we "discovered" an ideal beach, we would run our canoe up on it for the mere pleasure of utilizing such an extremely good landingplace, and once we were rewarded by finding the fresh prints of an antelope on the sand and a deserted bear-trap farther up on the shore, in the brush.

There were nights when we would go out in the canoe and float as far into the chain of lakes as we dared, with only the far-off cry of a loon or the soft whirr of a wild duck as it scurried low across the water to break the silence, and the mountains towering high all about us, silver-white in the moonlight, so that they looked like giant icebergs rising from the little sea, and making us feel that we were in some enchanted country. And when the moon sank behind some tall peak and a shadow fell upon the lake and the wind sprang up cold and strong, we would turn the boat around and row back, through the narrow little waterways, out into the big, open lake and make for the white dots on the far shore which we knew were our tents. And then, if it were not too late, we would build a big fire on the shore with great pieces of fallen trees, and the blaze would flare up as we gathered around it and sang "The Maple Leaf" or "The Red River Valley," and Au Clair de la Lune" and "L'Alouette." Anyone who has not heard Canadians sing these songs, especially "L'Alouette," which requires a strong voice and a great deal of breath and a wonderful memory, has missed a very stirring performance.

66

It was very hard to break camp, but the last day came, and we retraced our way

and again watched with breathless anxiety the heavy teams crawl up the steep hills or plunge into the swift little streams and pull themselves up the rocky banks. It was all the harder to go back because there was so little time left at all. The East, which had seemed so remote for three months, suddenly appeared surprisingly near. Breaking camp meant not only going back to the detachment, but the real beginning of the journey eastward. It was all over, and one had only just begun to enjoy hearing the coyotes howl at night and to be able to recognize quickly the different brands on the cattle and to feel a new life and elasticity in the clear, bracing air. There is something in the air which quickens every sense and makes one keen for danger or experience or pleasure especially pleasure. One lady told me that a year or so ago she had given a "tea" when the thermometer was thirty-four degrees below zero, and that every one of the invited guests came. But if people stopped for slight difficulties, not only all social intercourse but living itself would cease in northwest Canada. At least we felt that way when we accept ed an invitation to "afternoon tea" at a ranch fourteen miles away and on the other side of a very much swollen river just then filled with big logs which had been sent down from the mountains and which were spinning along at a most lively rate. Teas in the East are almost without exception considered bores, but in this case it really seemed that life would not be worth living if we did not go. To add to our personal difficulties, the horses usually driven to the trap could not be used, so that an obliging Englishman had to offer to take us. To do so he had to drive seventeen miles from his ranch to reach us, rest his horses, and take lunch eon with us before we could start on the real journey. But no one faltered in the stern determination to go. Ten miles drive to the river seemed a small matter, and, as we encountered several of the invited guests on our way, by the time we reached the crossing there was quite a procession, including two traps, a roadcart, light wagon, a young rancher on horseback, a baby, and a collection of dogs. At the critical moment it was discovered that the river was so high that

the water would come into every trap except ours, so it was necessary to make several trips with it to bring over all the women and the baby. The rest of the men drove the other traps over, while those who were already safely landed stood on the bank and shouted warnings and encouragement and contradictory advice to those crossing, in a perfectly maddening way. The young rancher, besides driving over his trap, had to bring over his saddle-horse, too. He did this by fastening his broncho to the downstream side of the span, propping his feet on the dashboard, and then trusting to Providence. If any one really wishes an exciting sensation he should watch a light trap attached to a team of spirited horses, with a young broncho alternately plunging and shying by their side, attempt to cross a deep river at the same time that logs anywhere from ten to fifteen feet long and as big around as one's head are racing down stream to see which can first knock the horses down by neatly hitting them on the forelegs, or splinter the spokes of the wheels or inextricably tangle themselves up under the body of the trap. After having experienced this pleasurable sensation we gravely pursued our way to the ranch of our hostess, talked to a dozen or so people, and ate lettuce-sandwiches and ices and drank chocolate just as we could and probably would have done if we had stayed at home, and bravely went through all our exciting experiences again on our way back. It did not occur to us until some time afterward that we had really gone to a great deal of trouble to get to that afternoon tea.

But all that was over now. There were to be no more house-parties or Indian tea-dances or gymkhanas, or glimpses of the Rockies, snowy and glistening in the clear morning air; no long, soft twilights when the purple air hung over the level land and the white moon swung across the heavens and the Great Bear and the evening star shone nearer and clearer than they ever shone before, and there came from far off the faintly heard gallop of some broncho as his rider urged him across the prairie, and the breath of the chinook as it sprang up and bore abroad the odor of the wolf-willow and wild rose and forget-me-not.