ON AGRICULTURE TO CANADA 29 



modious house on the ground. The other orchard was owned and 

 occupied by a gentleman who was once a farm student with Dr Gibb. 

 He had been four years in the province, and has fully 60 acres of 

 land. He paid 10,000 dollars for twelve acres, and 200 dollars an 

 acre for the rest. He has built a large house on the ground. We 

 got tea inside and there were thirty of us. That gives some idea of 

 the size of the house. Towards Hamilton the soil is of a gravelly 

 nature and is more suitable for early vegetable growing than for 

 fruit culture, and it is used much for this purpose. We left Hamilton 

 in the evening for Toronto. Next day the municipal authorities 

 of Toronto drove us round the city in motor cars, a city whose 

 streets are so long that they seem to have no beginning and no end. 

 After doing the city we drove to the Toronto Show, which is be- 

 coming the great live-stock show of Canada, where we spent the 

 greater part of two days. 



It was now 2nd September, and we had been eleven days in 

 Ontario. At 10 p.m. we left for the west. Before morning we 

 had passed the far-famed Muskoka Lakes. By breakfast time 

 we were passing through a desolate country, composed of great 

 boulders of rock, interspersed here and there with scrub. After 

 breakfast, we reached Sudbury on the Canadian Pacific Railway 

 from Montreal to Vancouver. The scenery, however, had not 

 changed save that in some places the trees were larger, an indication 

 that there was less rock and more soil. Now and again the monotony 

 of the picture, seen mile after mile and hour after hour, was relieved 

 by a lake or river or clearing in the forest, where one or more log 

 cabins had been built. One feature of the landscape is miles of 

 long, bare poles, which were once living trees. They indicate the 

 track of the forest fires, quite a number of which we passed on the 

 way. At Woman River we learned that a bridge had been burned 

 down ahead of us, and that it would be necessary to turn back and 

 reach Winnipeg by another route. We got back to Sudbury at 

 11.30 P.M., ignorant of what our movements might afterwards be. 

 Two routes were possible. One crossed the lakes to Port Arthur 

 and the other by the Sault Ste Marie Railway to St Paul and 

 Minneapolis, and thence to Winnipeg. At Sudbury we foimd a 

 paper posted up with the information that our train was to go to 

 Winnipeg by way of St Paul and Minneapolis. It was a lon^ 

 detour but it seemed the quickest way to Winnipeg. 



Manitoba 



Just as the sun was setting, we crossed the international boundary 

 at Emmerson, and entered Manitoba, the first of the three great 

 prairie provinces. It is not quite forty years since Manitoba had 

 only 17,000 inhabitants. It is always difficult in a new and growing 

 country to get at exact statistics of population, but it must to-day 

 have half a million people. In 1881 it grew about two million 

 bushels of grain. In 1907, the output had reached one hundred 

 million bushels. Entering the province from the south we got a 



