second thoughts I would make it the fifth on my list.

The muster roll of the old Cornish families, too, makes noble reading. Vivian, Reskymer; Carminoes-tracing their descent, beyond all likelihood of historic record, to Arthur himself, and lords a while back of Boconnock, Lany hydrock, Glyn, and Tregothnan; Bochigan, Polywhele, Pomeroy; Trevellions, whose ancestor, himself of an ancient family, reached shore at lastit is told-at Sennen Cove, still proudly astride his horse, only survivor from the sunk plains of Lyonesse; Godolphin, Tremayne, Trevannion. Romance is tangled in their rolling syllables.

Here, also, we can glean confidently around the outer bays and promontories. Coverack is as good a name as could be devised for a tiny granitebuilt fishing village, dropped out of the world almost on high-tide mark in a remote crack of the Lizard cliffs. Porthalla and Porthoustock-Peralla and Proustock, if you please are hard by along the coast.

St. Anthony, The Dodman, Carn Du, Cape Cornwall, Tintagel, are all meet names for rugged wave-breaking headlands, whose coves smugglers knew and furtive wreckers have haunted; where the Atlantic swell beats and echoes for ever, and the peregrine still nests in the rocks.

But some malignant fairy was of a surety present at the christening of the Scilly Islands, sea-fretted remnants of vanished Lyonesse.

The Wolf, The Long Ships, The Manacles, the Seven Stones-name of mysterious ill-omen-the Shambles, up Channel further east; these are meet places for shipwreck and disaster, wild cloud wrack and the thunder of hopeless surf.

But here are epitaphs for a noble deep-sea ship. "Foundered in Pegwell Bay." "Lost off Rottingdean." "Ashore at Littlehampton."

Such things happen, but the newspapers tell their story. The tragedies of poets or romancers must have a fitter setting. Wrecks are out of place in Mucking Bight or on the Mudstone Ledge, suggesting oyster-beds, and, indirectly, typhoid fever and drains.

But examples of one or the other might be gathered to fill many pages. This can be but a mere nibbling at the fringe, a note or notelet to so vast a subject, a splash on the verge of ocean. Every man may look to his memory for additions.

If it is possible to make a single general remark, I should say that it is mainly in the too frequent use of cumbrous and thundering adjectives and adverbs that we alter and abuse our mother-tongue of recent years. Tremendous and tremendously, extraordinary and its horrible adverb, excessive and excessively, and a whole following of their kith and kin are dead weights on written language.

Oh, for lightness, movement, and strength; more keen rapier work and less of the dull sledgehammer.

There is a fashion and use in words as in everything else, and an epoch may be classified as well by its adjectives as by the cut of its coats.

We have lived through a period where a miserable word in a grand connection has been conspicuous. "Jubilee!" what an offence it is to the eye and ear, horribly trivial and foolish for its purpose. There are many examples hardly worth the seeking, but in the search we may light on that which should give pleasure.

Twice recently I have by chance read mocking allusions to the noticeable recent growth of the word "strenuous," in a wide but definite sense. But this seems a hopeful instance, a trend to be encouraged.

It is a brave word-a good wordand compresses into its three syllables as much descriptive matter as a full

sheet of foolscap loosely written. "Gentle, honorable, strenuous." There you have a fine character without further description. "Gentleman," which expresses so much in so small a compass-no word more-varies too greatly in value with the user's fancy and idea. "Strenuous," it sounds its meaning.

It has been written somewhere that chosen words grouped in a proper manner form good prose, the best words grouped in the best possible manner, poetry. But I would not admit so clear a distinction; although it is to poets generally that we must turn to find a habit of keen appreciation of the sound and uses of fine syllables.

The sound of words is the music of true poets. The poetic idea alone is commoner than many think; to sing it to the true accompaniment of words is the rare gift.

"Forlorn! the very word is like a bell." Keats, perhaps, of all poets, Longman's Magazine.

found the truest use for the melody of syllables.

Daisies, the pearled arcturi of the earth;

The constellated flower that never

sets.

If ever words were well handled, here are pearls amongst them set in due order.

"Victor Galbraith," cries Longfellow in a dying refrain. "At midnight in the silence of the sleep time," murmurs Robert Browning-not often remarkable amongst poets for the melody of his single lines.

"Melody!" I doubt if another familiar language has so beautiful a word expressive of its meaning.

But the theme scarcely admits limits of pen and ink and human fancy.

Collect the words that seem to you sonorous, good in the mouth, or happy in their connection; and, in idle unexpected moments, fancy will stir them to weave their own romance.

Harold Ismay.

American millionaires were the principal import from the U. S. A. into Western Canada during the year 1902. In August and September especially you met them everywhere. They exhausted the champagne in the club cellars; their private cars impeded the traffic on the railroads; they went bumping over the prairie in buckboards, and grumbled humorously at the accommodation in the country hotels; they slept out in the woods after bear and wapiti; they were on board all the steamers, and paddling other people's canoes in more senses than one; some of them looked, and dressed,

like small shopkeepers; and some of them were as good fellows as you would wish to meet. Their small-talk was either inquisitorial or autobiographic.

When I got on board the Pullman of the Imperial Limited I felt as if I were in a New York Hotel. A Harvard youth, who was on his way to the Rockies to shoot sheep, offered me a light and told me how he had broken his collar-bone at polo; a Wall Street broker gave me a candid and unbiassed opinion of the comparative honesty of American and Canadian politicians, illustrated by personal experi

ences of his own; a Boston man, nearly bit my head off because I spoke irreverently of moose-calling as a form of sport; and a man from Montana wanted to know why I, personally, did not build a new hotel in Winnipeg? They told me what they thought about the Boer war-videlicet, that they wouldn't mind licking the British themselves, but that they didn't want anybody else to do so; and they asserted gleefully that the entire American army, with drums beating and colors flying, were still hunting for Aguinaldo's aged mother in the Philippines. When we got into Calgary— which they pronounced with the accent on the penultimate-they flocked, hatless, on to the platform, and kodaked every mounted policeman and every Indian who came within range. Then they turned their backs on the white peaks of the Rockies, standing out sharp and dazzling against the blue sky, and listened to the diningcar conductor's eulogium of the new brewery; and then they waved me a farewell from the tail-end of the Pullman, and told me to rejoin them at Banff.

The streets of Calgary, with their grey stone buildings, reminded one of a country town in Scotland. The population appeared to be composed principally of Englishmen, in Norfolk jackets with leather shoulders, and Stetson hats; Chinamen with pigtails and loose blouses; "pinto," or skewbald horses, with Mexican saddles; pointers, fox-terriers, setters, and "long dogs" crossed betwen wolf- and staghound. The floods had been out recently, and the river banks were littered with saw-logs; on the low-lying ground were mud-spattered houses tilted up at all sorts of angles, windowless, doorless, and shamelessly flaunting their nakedness to the outer world. Above them were rolling hills of green grass, and league-long wire

fences with posts of B.C. cedar and jack-pine,-for the big ranches are being gradually crowded farther west, and in the late fall the cattle are driven from the "foothills" in their thousands, to be slaughtered and packed away in cold storage, thereby saving their winter feed. My driver pointed with pride to the abattoir, a sinister dark-red building, round which wolfish-looking dogs were fiercely wrangling over the offal, and I was not sorry to drop down again to the rapids of the Bow River, and then swing round over the short smooth turf to the Ranchman's Club, there to talk horse and inspect a litter of Borzoi puppies which looked like half-shaven red rats.

For some fifty or sixty miles after Calgary you travel through the ranching country; past rounded, grassy foothills, and under river benches that rise, terrace above terrace, to long narrow plateaux; and then you see in front of you a mighty barrier of rock, and precipitous cliff-tall, sheer, and straight, as far as the eye can reach on either side; smeared with faint mildewy green along the base; scored and furrowed down the face, and crowned with irregular peaks of sparkling snow and ice. You catch your breath as you swing suddenly round the gap between two great battlemented walls-and then you are a little disappointed, for on one side of you are tall, pallid crags and colossal mounds of drab, dried earth, that look as though the children of the Titans had built gigantic mudpies and left them to bake in the sun. The guide-books will not tell you this, and, indeed, the scenery soon afterwards is so marvellous in its grandeur and beauty that the first impression fades away and is forgotten. The river below you is a milky blue, fringed with purple flowers: under the lee of a little green island is a raft of brown logs, but the mountains themselves are

somehow featureless and dingy, and it is only the fact that it takes you so long, first to reach, and then to pass, a particular hill, which enables you to realize its colossal size.

At the summit of the Kananaskis Pass Captain Palliser camped on August 22, 1858, at half-past four in the afternoon, near a small lake about half an acre in area, "where there was some tolerable grass for the horses. From this lake flow the first waters we had seen which descend to the Pacific Ocean. With these waters we supplied our tea-kettle, while our scanty supper of tough elk-meat was boiling in the waters of the Saskatchewan."

Near Canmore the banks of the river are carved into fantastic columns like huge yellow organ-pipes, where the soft deposits have been washed away and left monstrous pillars of hard conglomerate, known locally as "hoodoos"; on your left the ragged escarpment of the Rundle Mountains towers 5000 feet above the valley of the Bow; and on the opposite side is Cascade Mountain, just a couple of feet lower, with a foaming stream leaping from crag to crag down its steep slope of naked rock. Rundle was a Wesleyan missionary from near Edmonton, who camped here in 1841, shortly after Sir George Simpson's whirlwind expedition of five thousand miles in twelve weeks of actual travel; and "Cascade" is the English equivalent of the Indian name, meaning "Mountain where the water falls." In those days it was a favorite resort for white goat and grey sheep, and Dr. Hector relates how one of the former was wounded, and stood on a ledge beside the waterfall for seven days, till it fell over the precipice, and the hunters found that it had been shot in five different places.

There are too many tourists at Banff nowadays to suit the bighorns. When our train arrived in the early morning the sleeping-cars emptied themselves

promptly, and the passengers crowded round the bus of the Hot Springs Hotel, and clamored to the conductor for rooms. That dignitary held a written list in his hand, and called out the names of a chosen few. The rest returned disgusted to the train, and went on to try their luck at Field, or Laggan, or Glacier. I had taken the precaution to telegraph a week ahead, and drove proudly off up a long winding avenue of spruce and pine and Douglas fir to the green point above the falls of the Bow River where the railway company cleared away the jungle fourteen years ago and built a sort of combination of Swiss chalet, and bungalow, and baronial hall, lit by electricity, with sulphur baths, and swimming-tanks, and billiard-tables, and Swiss guides, and lady orchestras, and balconies, and terraces,-all perched some 4700 feet above the level of the sea in the heart of the everlasting hills.

It was the strangest mixture of civilization and barren wilderness. Nearly 75 per cent of the visitors were Americans, 20 per cent travelling Englishmen and Australians, and the rest Canadi

ans.

There were Alpine Club men, long and sinewy, with thin, tanned faces; there was an Australian who looked like a typical John Bull, with a son who looked like a typical Cornstalk; there were peers and parsons; there were American girls-some in diamonds, some who knew the scientific names of every moss and lichen in the neighborhood, some who discussed their private affairs for the benefit of every one in the room, and others who said very little but absorbed everything they saw silently; and there was a Personally Conducted Party from my own native land. The conductor, was a big, important-looking man, with a face that reminded you of a bull-frog, and he thoroughly understood the art of réclame. In every

place in Canada at which the party stopped their arrival was heralded in the newspapers. They were representatives of all that was best in literature and science and art in the mother country. When the average Canadian saw them, he looked at the average Englishman and winked, as who should say, "There! didn't I always tell you?" When the average Englishman saw them he ran away. The women were long and angular, the brims of their straw hats drooped over their noses, and they carried Huntley & Palmer's tin biscuit-boxes tied round with string in one hand; in the other they had red baize bags like K. C.'s. Most of the men were quite small, with big beards and long hair. There were schoolboys who had overgrown their strength, and tutors in flannel caps and blazers, whose portraits you will find in the works of Mr. Jerome K. Jerome. All their individuality had become merged in that of the conductor. They asked his permission before they went in to meals (this is an actual fact; the Boston girl never let me forget it), and they stood by and gazed at him admiringly while he announced to a dumfounded audience that they were travelling in thir own reserved car! The Philadelphia man-all the fittings in his private car are silver, including the door-hinges-looked at him long and thoughtfully, and then he turned to the man from Boston and said, "See here! If you'll give that fellow a licking, I'll pay the fine and the costs of the court."

If they had been Americans I could have made that Boston girl sit up. As it was

I went out on to the terrace behind in the sun, and looked through a vista of tall, tapering, dark-green firs. On the left there was a rugged, sombre, grey precipice topped with pines; in front were two dove-grey crags with high white peaks beyond. To the right

was a valley under a razor-backed mountain like a thresher's fin. Between the trees in front I caught a glimpse of the blue Bow, and in my ears was the rustling of the leaves of the white poplar, and the singing, rippling surge of the falls three hundred feet below.

We scrambled and slid down over a smooth carpet of pine-needles to the little bridge, under which the Spray River dashes and tumbles along at ten miles an hour, emerald green in the pools, grey over the pebbles, and clear as crystal everywhere; under the shadow of spruce and jack-pine; over stony beaches, curving round the base of a slaty promontory, capped with a thin line of sentinel firs; till it merges in the milky blue of the glacier-fed Bow. A little above their confluence the latter slides down in a steep cascade of dazzling foam between huge slabs of rock, pushed aside and piled up on either bank, and then slackens in translucent patches of sapphire and brown agate: below again are little wooded islands.

We rode all round the valley another day, on little western ponies that seemed to crawl up the side of a mountain like flies on a window-pane; we halted beside a strangely dappled tarn of pallid green and white at the foot of a stupendous wall of bare rock; we saw more hoodoos, that looked like a ruined castle in the distance, and like great kobolds in grave-clothes when you got closer; we bathed in the long swimming-bath, where the water has a temperature of 103°, and is about as buoyant as the sea; we crawled along a dark passage-way into a cave, where there was a basin of clear blue water that smelt of sulphur, under a roof that was carved by Nature into the similitude of horrible vampires and were-wolves; and at night we sat beside the big open fireplace in the main hall, and talked about shooting and