the Rockies where the minerals lie over and above the mining towns, the
centres of ranching country, and the supply towns to the farming
districts. There are literally scores upon scores of lakelets in the
hills, buried in woods now, that before twenty years are run will be
crowded summer resorts. You in England have no idea of what 'summering'
means in the States, and less of the amount of money that is spent on
the yearly holiday. People have no more than just begun to discover the
place called the Banff Hot Springs, two days west of Winnipeg.[1] In a
little time they will know half-a-dozen spots not a day's ride from
Montreal, and it is along that line that money will be made. In those
days, too, wheat will be grown for the English market four hundred miles
north of the present fields on the west side; and British Columbia,
perhaps the loveliest land in the world next to New Zealand, will have
her own line of six thousand ton steamers to Australia, and the British
investor will no longer throw away his money on hellicat South American
republics, or give it as a hostage to the States. He will keep it in the
family as a wise man should. Then the towns that are to-day the only
names in the wilderness, yes, and some of those places marked on the map
as Hudson Bay Ports, will be cities, because--but it is hopeless to make
people understand that actually and indeed, we _do_ possess an Empire of
which Canada is only one portion--an Empire which is not bounded by
election-returns on the North and Eastbourne riots on the South--an
Empire that has not yet been scratched.

[Footnote 1: See pp. 187-188.]

Let us return to the new towns. Three times within one year did fortune
come knocking to the door of a man I know. Once at Seattle, when that
town was a gray blur after a fire; once at Tacoma, in the days when the
steam-tram ran off the rails twice a week; and once at Spokane Falls.