wheat in their aprons. Meanwhile the old farmer was asking many questions. He was particularly anxious to know the value of Russian money in New York, for he still had a little stock of rubles which he had brought with him from his old home. The Mennonites are, almost without exception, well-to-do people. What is the mysterious connection between the doctrine of non-resistance and worldly prosperity? Why do they always go together? After a while Brother Peters asked us to go home with him, and see his house, which was but a few yards away from the threshing-floor. It was built of logs, plastered with clay, and thatched with straw. The chimney was a square hole in the roof. The inside of the house was rough, but comfortable, or at least it might be made so. The floor was made of clay. Peters was particular to impress upon us that the house was not finished; he had bought the shell, as it stood, from another man, and he pointed out with admirable pride how he proposed to wall off a Gastzimmer here and a Speisezimmer there. The central point of the establishment was the great oven, which answered at once for purposes of cooking the food and warming the rooms. All improvements in the place the old man intended to make with his own hands at his workbench, which occupied one side of the living-room. These people on the prairies understand what housemaking very much better than the dwellers in cities can possibly understand it. We dabble in the refinements of decorative art, and fret ourselves because a color does not harmonize or a line is out of symmetry. It is, after all, only a question of what kind of veneer we shall use to cover the frame-work of life. The men and women of the frontier touch the solid facts of existence. They have to face the problemgiven a prairie and a pile of lumber, how to make a house? As we sat there in that rude room talking with the old Russian, puffing away quietly at a pipe of the peace-making Indian weed, we seemed to have entered quite into the circle of his domestic life. In one corner of the room sat the old Hausfrau combing her scanty locks. The eldest daughter was very busy with some household work, while the little grandchild played on the floor beside the work-bench. In the middle of the room was the dinner table; presently three or four girls came in from their work, and we were cordially asked to sit down with them to their Vesperbrod of black bread, melons, and coffee. When we went away the old man invoked many blessings on us, and we promised to send him a copy of Harper's Magazine. ing to you, Peters. Schweinsglück! Here's a greetMay you have It was a dull rainy evening when we bade farewell to Pembina, and were ferried across the shallow muddy river to St. Vincent. I suppose it is called the Red River because the water is of a whity-brown color. At the railway stameans tion confusion reigned. A large party of STREET VIEW IN CITY OF WINNIPEG. immigrants had just arrived with through | ed) "best hotel in town." May a kind tickets by the steamboat line to Winnipeg. But owing to the lowness of the water, and an accident which occurred a few weeks before, there was no boat ready to go down the river. The party must go on by rail, and the officers of the branch line from St. Vincent to St. Boniface, opposite Winnipeg, refused to make any allowance for the steamboat tickets. Despair ruled in the crowded, murky car into which we were packed. Many of the poor immigrants could ill afford the additional cost. We had to pay $3 25 for riding over sixty-five miles of wretched track at the rate of ten miles an hour. The road-bed is so rough that when they run at higher speed, the engine bell is rung by the oscillation. fortune preserve us from the worst! Morning light revealed to us the metropolis of the Northwest. We saw a broad main street bordered with high wooden sidewalks, and rows of shops of every shape and size. Some were rude wooden shanties; others were fine buildings of yellow brick. High over all towered the handsome spire of the Knox Church. Several saw and grist mills sent up incessant puffs of white steam into the clear air. The street was full of bustle and life. There were wagons of all descriptions standing before the stores. Long lines of Red River carts were loading with freight for the interior. The sidewalks were filled with a miscellaneous crowd of people: German peasants, Long after midnight we were landed the women in dark blue gowns and head in the mud at St. Boniface. Here we fell kerchiefs, the men marked by their little into the hands of the custom-house Phil- flat caps; French half-breeds, with jaunistines. Never have I seen courtesy and ty buckskin jackets, many-colored scarfs intelligence so successfully concealed un- around their waists, and their black hair der a veil of rude stupidity. Gad stood shining with oil; Indians, dark, solemn, by in the cold damp gloom, and gave vig- gaunt, stalking along in blanket and mocorous expression to his feelings in four casins; Scotch and English people, lookdifferent languages, while the officer of ing as they do all the world over, but customs ploughed through our carefully here, perhaps, a little quicker and more packed trunk, upsetting our gun trap- energetic. The middle of the street, pings, and sniffing at paint tubes, until at though there had been but a single night last he concluded to detain the luggage of rain, was a vast expanse of mud-mud on suspicion, and we went off wearily to so tenacious that the wheels of the wagfind our way across the river to Winni- ons driving through it were almost as peg. We arrived finally at the (so-call-large as mill-wheels; and when we dared to cross it, we came out on the other side | al character of the land, and indeed no with much difficulty, and feet of elephantine proportions. The city of Winnipeg, which eight years ago was nothing more than a cluster of houses about the Hudson Bay Company's fort, now contains over seven thousand inhabitants. It is the distributing centre for a large region, a place of great business activity, and so situated in relation to the back country and the facilities for transportation that it is sometimes called "the Bleeder's Paradise." It is built on a clay bank at the junction of the Assiniboine with the Red River. The nature of the soil is such that it is difficult to find a good foundation for a house, and many of the larger buildings have settled and cracked. amount of travel at this season of the year would have qualified us to give a fair description. But all travellers who have gone through the country in the spring and early summer speak of it as being very rich, but very much under water. The lower part of the Red River Valley has always been subject to inundation. In August, 1877, the roads were so impassable, and conveyances so dear, that it was difficult to go outside of Winnipeg, and in consequence many people who had come to settle in the province went back discouraged. This year one hundred and forty Mennonite families were forced to remove from the Red River Reserve because the land was too wet to cultivate. Professor Hind, whose report We had the driest time of the year for is standard authority, says: "The counour visit, but in the course of our excur- try possessing a mean elevation of 100 sions about the town we were impressed feet above Lake Winnipeg.... may be by the general wetness of the land. In estimated at 70,000 square miles, of which fact, it was very forcibly brought home to nine-tenths are lake, marsh, or surface our consciousness, for we almost succeed-rock of Silurian or Devonian age." Along ed in bogging a fine horse as we were driving home one day through the back streets of the city. Those prairie bogholes are deceptive. They often look dry, but they have no bottom. When a Win-pressly excepted from the homestead pronipegger gets his wagon stuck in one of them, he loosens the traces and lets the horses scramble out; and then, pulling off his clothes, goes in to extricate the vehicle, which, by the skillful use of ropes, he usually accomplishes. Our personal explorations in Manitoba were not thorough enough to enable us to speak of the gener the banks of the Red River and the Assiniboine the land is somewhat drier and better, but it is all taken up by the so-called Settlement Belt, which is ex visions of the Dominion Lands Act. As a result of all this, most of the immigrants are forced to go further west, to Portage la Prairie or beyond, where the land is higher and not in need of drainage. Still further away, in the Northwest Territory, along the Little Saskatchewan and the Big Saskatchewan, the country is report amusing nor profitable. The Canadian | last, at an agricultural dinner, by Lord Pacific Railway will, of course, remove this difficulty; but it is hard to say where it will run or how soon it will be finished. The hopes of the people are set upon the completion of this road, and thus far they seem to find no trouble in living on hopes and growing fat withal. The immigration into Manitoba has been astonishingly rapid. Two causes have recently operated to check it. A great deal of the best land in the province is excepted from the homestead provisions of the Land Act by a complicated system of reserves. For instance, a belt of five miles on either side of the proposed railway line is only open to purchasers at six dollars an acre. The second and still greater obstacle is the law passed in July last, practically limiting the homestead grant to eighty acres. It is absurd to suppose that settlers will content themselves with this amount when they can get 160 acres of equally good land under similar conditions by simply crossing the imaginary line which divides the British Possessions from the United States. In the light of these facts it was amusing to read a quotation from a speech made in September Beaconsfield, in which he gravely stated that nearly all of the largest land-holders in the extreme western States of America had sold out their farms and gone to seek a living in the new Canadian territory. As an effort of the Oriental imagination, this was excellent; but as history, it was amazingly incorrect. The immigrants into Manitoba, with the exception of the Mennonites, have been almost without exception British subjects, and a very large majority of them have come from the province of Ontario. Large numbers, being dissatisfied, have recrossed the line, and settled in Dakota and Minnesota. In Pembina County alone the number of Canadians is reckoned at one-half of the population. The most interesting object in Winnipeg-perhaps we may say the only thing which has anything of the picturesque about it-is Fort Garry, the head-quarters of "the Governor and company of adventurers of England trading into Hudson's Bay." It stands well up above the swift, muddy current of the Assiniboine. from the opposite bank of the river in the lingering glow of an amber twilight, there Seen ASSINIBOINE RIVER. water have passed over these battered counters to civilize the Indian. Here the Governor of the Company once ruled over the land of Assiniboia. Here the half-breeds gathered themselves in 1869 to resist the authority of the Canadian government. It was the dream of their leader, Louis Riel, to found a nation of mixed races, and that sensational love of liberty which runs in the Gallic blood spoke in its native language and after its ancient fashion here in this far wilderness. It sounds like an echo of Paris to read the deliverances of the Comité National des Métis de la Rivière Rouge which were issued from this gray old fort. But at last the power of Great Britain arrived on the scene in the shape of a military force, which Colonel Wolseley, now of Zulu fame, had led across the swamps and through the trackless forests between Winnipeg and Montreal. The nation of mixed races vanished into thin air, and the province of Manitoba came into substantial being. This was in the summer of 1870, and since then the old fort has fallen into the humdrum of a mere commercial life. The Red River at Winnipeg is about a hundred yards wide. The gray and rugged Cathedral of St. Boniface still stands on the eastern bank, and the bells of the Roman mission still "call from their turrets twain." But the "voyageur" no longer sweeps along the current and hears their far-off vesper chiming. Twenty years ago the first steamboat puffed its way down the river, and the silent-gliding canoe fleets have vanished. There is nothing of hardship or adventure about a voyage on the Red River now, and it was simply in the interest of physical comfort, and for the sake of variety, that we chose to leave Winnipeg by water. The Minnesota was run up alongside of the steep bank (for in this country they do not need is an air of antiquity and romance about the rough gray wall, pierced by a low gateway, and flanked by rude turrets which lean as if they had heard of Pisa, and were trying to introduce the graces of civilization into the wilderness. Here the blue banner of the Hudson Bay Company has floated for many years above the little quadrangle where the white man and the red man have met to barter the products of Europe for the skins of the wild north land. "Pro pelle cutem," skin for skin, is the motto of the Company, and many a poor fellow has paid for his gains in peltry by losing his own scalp at last. Millions of skins have been gathered from the lonely forest and the frozen waste into these low dark store-houses. Ship-loads of cloth and beads and powder and fire-wharves), and we embarked for St. Vin |