was strange beyond anything that this bald telling can suggest--opening
a door into a new world. The only commonplace thing about the spot was
its name--Medicine Hat, which struck me instantly as the only possible
name such a town could carry. This is that place which later became a
town; but I had seen it three years before when it was even smaller and
was reached by me in a freight-car, ticket unpaid for.

That next morning brought us the Canadian Pacific Railway as one reads
about it. No pen of man could do justice to the scenery there. The
guide-books struggle desperately with descriptions, adapted for summer
reading, of rushing cascades, lichened rocks, waving pines, and
snow-capped mountains; but in April these things are not there. The
place is locked up--dead as a frozen corpse. The mountain torrent is a
boss of palest emerald ice against the dazzle of the snow; the
pine-stumps are capped and hooded with gigantic mushrooms of snow; the
rocks are overlaid five feet deep; the rocks, the fallen trees, and the
lichens together, and the dumb white lips curl up to the track cut in
the side of the mountain, and grin there fanged with gigantic icicles.
You may listen in vain when the train stops for the least sign of breath
or power among the hills. The snow has smothered the rivers, and the
great looping trestles run over what might be a lather of suds in a huge
wash-tub. The old snow near by is blackened and smirched with the smoke
of locomotives, and its dulness is grateful to aching eyes. But the men
who live upon the line have no consideration for these things. At a
halting-place in a gigantic gorge walled in by the snows, one of them
reels from a tiny saloon into the middle of the track where half-a-dozen
dogs are chasing a pig off the metals. He is beautifully and eloquently
drunk. He sings, waves his hands, and collapses behind a shunting
engine, while four of the loveliest peaks that the Almighty ever moulded
look down upon him. The landslide that should have wiped that saloon