PRELUDE

Harvest-time was almost come, and the great new land was resting under
coverlets of gold. From the rise above the town of Lebanon, there
stretched out ungarnered wheat in the ear as far as sight could reach,
and the place itself and the neighbouring town of Manitou on the other
side of the Sagalac River were like islands washed by a topaz sea.

Standing upon the Rise, lost in the prospect, was an old, white-haired
man in the cassock of a priest, with grey beard reaching nearly to the
waist.

For long he surveyed the scene, and his eyes had a rapt look.

At last he spoke aloud:

"There shall be an heap of corn in the earth, high upon the hills;
his fruit shall shake like Libanus, and shall be green in the city
like grass upon the earth."

A smile came to his lips--a rare, benevolent smile. He had seen this
expanse of teeming life when it was thought to be an alkali desert, fit
only to be invaded by the Blackfeet and the Cree and the Blood Indians on
a foray for food and furs. Here he had come fifty years before, and had
gone West and North into the mountains in the Summer season, when the
land was tremulous with light and vibrating to the hoofs of herds of