inundating floods.

Chief mention has been made of the races from the south of Europe
because the races from the north of Europe assimilate so quickly that
their identity is lost. Of Scandinavians there are in Canada some
fifty thousand; of Icelanders, easily twenty thousand; and so quickly
do they merge with Canadian life that you forget they are foreigners.
I was a child in Winnipeg when the first Icelanders arrived, and their
rise has been a national epic. I do not believe the first few hundreds
had fifty dollars among them. They slept under high board sidewalks
for the first nights and erected tar-paper shanties on vacant lots the
next day. In these they housed the first winter. Though we
Winnipeggers did not realize it, it must have been a dreadful winter to
them. Their clothing was of the scantest. Many were without
underwear. They lived ten and twenty to a house. The men sawed wood
at a dollar and a half a day. The women worked out at one dollar a
day. In a few weeks each family had bought a cow and rudiments of
winter clothes. By spring they had money to go out on their
homesteads. During winter some of the grown men attended school to
learn English. Teachers declared they never witnessed such swift
mastery of learning. To-day the Icelanders are the most prosperous
settlers in Manitoba. The same story could be told of German
Mennonites driven from Russia by religious persecution and of
Scandinavians driven abroad by poverty. Of course, the weak went to
the wall and died, and didn't whine about the dying, though some
mother's heart must have broken in silence. I recall one splendid
young fellow who walked through every grade the public schools
afforded, and then through the high school, and was on the point of
graduating in medicine when he died from sheer mental and physical
exhaustion. This type of settler will build up Canada's national