CHAPTER II.

Long before the vision of a confederation of the British
Provinces entered into the brain of any man, Lord Selkirk,
coming to the wilds of North America, found a tract of
country fertile in soil, and fair to look upon. He arrived
in this unknown wilderness when it was summer, and all
the prairie extending over illimitable stretches till it
was lost in the tranquil horizon, was burning with the
blooms of a hundred varieties of flowers. Here the "tiger
rose," like some savage queen of beauty, rose to his
knees and breathed her sultry balm in his face. Aloof
stood the shy wild rose, shedding its scent with delicate
reserve; but the wild pea, and the convolvulus, and the
augur flower, and the insipid daisy, ran riot through
all the grass land, and surfeited his nostrils with their
sweets. Here and there upon the mellow level stood a
clump of poplars or white oaks, prim, like virgins without
suitors, with their robes drawn close about them; but
when over the unmeasured plain the wind blew, they bowed
their heads: as if saluting the stranger who came to
found a colony in the wilderness of which they were
sentinels. Here too, in the hush, for the first time,
the planter's ear heard a far-off, nigh indistinct, sound
of galloping thunder. He knew not what it meant, and his
followers surmised that it might be the tumult of some
distant waterfall, borne hither now because a storm was
at hand, and the denser air was a better carrier of the
sound. And while they remained wondering what it could