come out here. I used to think there must be lots of openings for
engineers, doctors, etc., in the small towns that were almost daily
springing up along the line, but that is not so. Of course there is
now and then a chance, say for a doctor to start in some place where
eighty or a hundred people have congregated together, and if he can
live on his own pills till another couple of oughts are added to the
figure, he may get a good practice. But then he may not, because
somebody else may get it instead. The fact of the matter is, and I
have high government officials for my authority, that, owing to the
educational mania, which is every whit as rampant here as it is in
England, this country produces annually a number of professional
men, of every class, far in excess of the demand. The illiterate
settler makes his money pretty easy, and then, being impressed with
the "free country" rubbish that is talked here, he decides that his
sons shall not be farm labourers, they shall be gentlemen. "Why the
blazes shouldn't 'Bob' be just as good a doctor or lawyer as anyone
else?" So to school and to college they go, and having been made
gentlemen of, they lounge about the towns, filling the bars and the
billiard-rooms, and smoking themselves green while waiting for a
breeze. Why, in this wretched little place, of about 20 to 25,000
inhabitants, there are thirty lawyers and twenty-five doctors in the
directory, and all these have one or more satelites. Well, this is
all very dry.

The weather is getting colder every day, and the shop windows are
getting full of snow-shoes, mocassins, etc. I hear very different
stories about the winter. Some people say it is so cold that the
rain freezes into icicles as it comes down from the clouds, and so
forms pillars which you can climb up and skate about overhead. And
others say it's so jolly mild in the coldest weather that you've