A Nobleman's View of the North- West 543 



those used in Abyssinia for the easy supply of water from a depth 

 of a few feet below the surface. Alkali in the water will never hurt 

 his cattle, and dykes of turf and the planting of trees would every- 

 where ensure him and them the shelter that may be required. 

 $500 should be his own to spend on his arrival, unless as an artisan he 

 comes here and finds that, like the happy masons now to be found in 

 Winnipeg, he can get the wages of a British army colonel, by put- 

 ting up houses as fast as brick, wood and mortar can be got together. 



" Favourable testimony as to the climate was everywhere given. 

 The heavy night dews throughout the North-West keep the country 

 green when everything is burned to the south, and the steady 

 winter cold, although it sounds formidable when registered by the 

 thermometer, is universally said to be far less trying than the cold 

 to be encountered at the old English Puritan city of Boston, in 

 Massachusetts. It is the moisture in the atmosphere which makes 

 cold tell, and the Englishman who, with his thermometer at zero, 

 would, in his moist atmosphere, be shivering, would here find one 

 flannel shirt sufficient clothing while working. I never like to make 

 comparisons, and am always unwillingly driven to do so, although 

 it seems to be the natural vice of the well-travelled Englishman. 

 Over and over again in Canada have I been asked if such and such 

 a bay was not wonderfully like the Bay of Naples, for the inhabi- 

 tants had often been told so. I always professed to be unable to 

 see the resemblance, of course entirely out of deference to ths suscep- 

 tibilities of the Italian nation. So one of our party, a Scotchman, 

 whenever in the Rocky Mountains he saw some grand pyramid or 

 gigantic rock, ten or eleven thousand feet in height, would exclaim 

 that the one was the very image of Arthur's Seat and the other of 

 Edinburgh Castle. 



" With the fear of Ontario before my eyes I would therefore 

 never venture to compare a winter here to those of our greatest 

 Province, but I am bound to mention that when a friend of mine 

 put the question to a party of sixteen Ontario men who had settled 

 in the western portion of Manitoba, as to the comparative merits of 

 the cold season of the two Provinces — fourteen of them voted for 

 the Manitoba climate, and only two elderly men said that they pre- 



