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could be obtained for them.

The unwonted work and hard fare soon told on them. On the fourth day they were very tired animals, and on the evening of the sixth, when we were still fifteen miles from La Corne, they were so tired as to be scarcely able to move. They had worked faithfully and well without having once required the whip.

Mackay pointed to his animals, making signs that we must camp as they could go no farther. With the aid of a small Cree vocabulary we managed to make Mackay understand that it was important to push on to La Corne that night in order to obtain fresh horses with which to reach Prince Albert in time to catch the train for the

on the route. This gentleman procured us horses and a sleigh and at noon we left for Prince Albert, distant about fifty miles. We had to change horses midway and arrived at Prince Albert a couple of hours before the train left. At La Corne I paid off and bade good-bye to Baptiste and Mackay who, after a rest of two days, returned with the ponies to Red Earth.

I was anxious to pay a visit to a barber as soon as possible as my hair had not been cut for four months, but as we arrived at Prince Albert at 2 a. m. and left at 4 a. m., there was no opportunity there. My long hair, tuque, moccasins and generally rough appearance brought me many a stare on the cars

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South the next day, and that we would require to rest several hours and then push on again. Baptiste and Mackay Baptiste and Mackay made several signs to us which we could not understand; however, after a good supper, and three hours of rest, we saw what they meant. Very much to our surprise they lightened the toboggans by each taking a heavy pack on his own back. The ponies were thus enabled to make good headway and we duly arrived at La Corne that night.

We there received the same kind welcome and attention from the Hudson Bay Company's Agent that we had invariably received from the Hudson Bay Company's Agents at evey post

from Prince Albert to Winnipeg, which was quite disconcerting to a man of my modest temperament. Immediately on my arrival at Winnipeg I paid the contemplated visit to the barber. This, with a fur cap instead of a tuque, boots instead of moccasins and a fresh overcoat instead of the camp-stained one I had been wearing made quite a difference in my outward man. The next morning the guard of the Manitoba House shouted as usual, "All aboard going east," and kept looking around for some one. Suddenly he recognized me, saying, "Well, Sir, I did not know you at all; the clerk told me the same gentleman would leave to-day who

came yesterday, and I am looking for him." No wonder he did not recognize me. The somewhat civilized being he now saw was not a bit like the rough hairy individual he had seen arrive the day before.

On my arrival at Ottawa I found that my friends had not heard from me for three months, and fears were entertained for my safety. I had frequently

sent letters by chance messengers to Cumberland House, where there is a monthly mail service. These letters arrived in Ottawa two weeks after my return, and a budget of letters that I would have been very glad to have received while I was in the wilderness duly followed me back and came to hand some time after my return.

LITERATURE.

AN ADDRESS MADE AT THE RECENT ANNUAL BANQUET OF THE CANADIAN PRESS ASSOCIATION, BY W. A. FRASER.

YOUR asking me to respond to the

YOUR

toast of Literature, brings to my mind a story that is going the rounds in London.

A party of Jews were discussing literature. One of them remarked that Zangwill was clever-very clever.

"Zangwill clever?" objected another of the party; "he's not cleverthat is nothing, his writing about the Jews. He knows us, for he is a Jew himself. Why should he not write about us? But look at Baring Gould. He knows nothing about us, and see how much he writes about us. That is clever, if you like."

So you have probably honoured me with this office much upon the principle that I shall emulate Baring Gould.

About literature I know very little -in fact I'm almost inclined to quarrel with the very word literature itself. If I could find a strong Saxon word to replace it I would never use it at all. Literature, as a generic term for the concrete thoughts of men done into the cold, unsympathetic world of black and white, has much too soft a ring. It is suggestive of dilettanteism, of Lake Como in everlasting sunshine. It is trippingly sweet. We speak glibly of literature, and feel, somehow, as though we had given our boots an extra rub with the brush of fine culture.

What we need here in Canada, and, for the matter of that, wherever the elongated, crimson-dotted postage stamp goes, is a literature that abounds in stories of strong, true, beautiful deeds. But above all else we must have Truth. We are strong, rugged people. Our country is great in its God-given strength its masculine. beauty. Canada is one of Mother Earth's bravest, sturdiest sons. Even our climate is boisterous and strengthproducing. Strength begets Truth, and Truth makes Strength God-like.

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and Strength if they would scale the cold glacier of criticism. Our newspaper writers and editors, for in their hands is more of literature and the making of literature than the people who talk so smoothly about it would have us believe, stand in Canada far in the vanguard of Truth and Strength. Their work is clean and wholesome and virile.

I

To-day the Canadian press has nothing to fear from comparison with the whole world. Canadian papers are a credit to this strong, God-fearing land of unfettered expression. I, for one, do not want to know of all the shame, and misery and crime, real and imaginary, that is in the world. haven't time to go into it. My moral nature needs healthier food; and my family, young and ready for impressions, cannot wade through chronicles. of violence and infamy day after day, and still believe in the good of humanity. From the one or two Canadian papers that come into my hands I get all the really great things that are happening in the world, and I escape the filth. This may be lack of enterprise, but I am content.

Good as our papers are, we should go further-we should foster a literature that will be placed on our shelves, and which will hand down to posterity the good and true things this young generation is doing, and their forefathers did before them. We have one magazine that, equally with our papers, is a credit to Canada. That Canada gives it the support it should have and is entitled to, I do not believe. If it does not come up to the mark of the high-priced United States magazines, shall we buy the New York magazine only and let our own young literature die? Shall we let our churches go unsupported because Talmage is in New York-because he is stronger than our local man? With all respect to the cloth, we need them no more than we need a healthy literature.

So far literature has done little for Canada. She is the "Lady of the Snows," the abode of wicked French

priests, who are only kept from ruining everybody by the gallantry of the hero. I have seen some of these French priests, and never saw but good of their work. In the far North-west a good French priest, Father Lacomb, has laboured among the Indians, as though they were his own children, for a lifetime. A sweet-faced old gentleman he is now, and all he has for his long life of hardship and exposure is the knowledge that he has tried to do his Master's bidding. I think he has done it. But literature passes him by, and builds a romance in which the central figure is a wicked priest.

The great Northwest is a land of blizzards, peopled by bad Indians. I wanted to do some blizzard literature myself, and started to get the genesis of those frozen siroccos. I asked people about them, and I wrote to people about them. I found only one man who had been in a true blizzard, and he was too badly frightened to remember anything about the physical aspect of the thing. It was like a hunt for the sea serpent. They are as rare as literature has taught us they are plentiful.

What we want is realism, a modern realism that will let the world see us as we are a strong, healthy, growing nation; full of life, and aspirations, and determination: and through it all you may weave the golden thread of love if you like, for all that is founded on love is good and true. The literature of Christ was all love.

Let us have a literature that will deal with the problems of life as it is, not of a life that is dead and obsolete and of which no man may speak with certainty, a literature that will bring the classes to a better understanding of each other and each other's needsnot that will bring them together, for that is an Utopian realization that would only bring disaster; rather that will keep them lovingly apart; teach them not to plot against each other, not to hate each other, but to know that each one in his allotted place is the order of the universe.

Much literature to-day pictures the

employer as a grasping, avaricious, slave-driving demon. An employer of this order is a good substantial rib in the structure of a modern novel. On the other hand, all the employees are ready for revolt, for almost any crime, incapable of good. Then one day we read in a paper of an engineer on some railroad giving his life for the people placed in his hands. A captain and a crew (if they are British or American) cheerfully go to their death that the women and children may be saved. We read that in the newspapers; so it is not literature, and is soon forgotten. The books with the other in, the false literature, lie on our tables, and are on the shelves of our libraries. We cherish them, and the newspaper is thrown in the waste basket. Let us transplant this spirit of truth from our newspapers to our fiction, and we shall have a fiction that is true. If our young writers would try to give us stories dealing with the problems and trials and mysticisms of the life all about us, they would do more to build up a national literature than they ever will by posing over the more or less inaccurate records of the life that is extinct.

We have a great field for our story writers and poets in the Northwest. There is local colour in abundance, and the colour of God, which is the beauty of the universe.

I have been

in many parts of the world, the Orient and the Occident; I have seen beautiful places and magnificent parks; grand gardens and noble avenues; but let me tell you, gentlemen, that the most beautiful spot on this round earth is the valley of the Northern Saskatchewan, in this strong, rugged country that stands as a rampart between the Atlantic and Pacific. Go there, gentlemen, in August and September, and you will see God's own garden stretching mile on mile, from silver stream to the eternal blue of the distant "Rockies."

Crimson, and gold, and azure; and the soft, pearly greys of delicate grasses, and shrubs, that carpet the

black mould until you sink knee deep in a wealth of trailing, purple-tipped pea-vine, and pink flesh-coloured castillja. And not one blade of all this splendour was sown or planted by the hand of man; not one design in the whole vast park laid out by human gardener. There you will be face to face with the beauties of God's gifts, and no warning to "keep off the grass." You may roll down those jewelled hills, all set with ruby, and amethyst, and pearl flowers, like a boy. And as you roll there will be in the air the whistle of crescent wings, as the grouse and partridge cut through the warm sunshine, startled by the queer, hobgoblin appearance of a man.

If our young writers wish for a true literature, let them go there, out into the open, into the university of God, even as Moses did for forty years. Beside all this splendour, of which I can give you little conception, the magnificence of Solomon was poor and tawdry indeed. Even the lilies were arrayed in greater glory than he.

And of the people in that land, what has literature taught us? Do we know the Indian? I fear not. We know that he has forever and ever prowled about with scalping knife in hand, and heart set on murder. But we do not know that he is far more truthful than the white man; that you may leave your shack door open, not unlocked alone but wide open, and all that an Indian loves hanging about within reach, and you will find it all there when you return one month, or six; from that date—that is, unless there have been white men about? And there was morality with them. A noseless woman now and then bore testimony to the fact that violation of the seventh commandment met with swift punishment. And who shall describe the love of these people for their children? Their grief over the death of a child was terribly tragic in its intensity. Women took sharp flints and scored deep gashes in their limbs to dull the pain tugging at their heartstrings.

And the wonder of it is that there is any honesty or truth left among them, because of their treatment by the higher civilized Pale-face.

As long as a Scotchman breathes, (and while air is as cheap as it is, that will be a long time,) the name of Burns will linger. I might even add, after that also for there will always be Scotchmen—they are the chosen people. This is because, as everyone knows, his literature was of the heart, and the soul of things-simple and close to nature-therefore close to the hearts of his countrymen. Blinded by a false conception of the meaning of literature, his worth and truth were not known as they should have been, until it was too late But for the posterity that has taken Shakespeare, and Goethe, and Burns to its heart, it is never too late. That is also the literature we need here the literature that Louis Kossuth, the Hungarian, went to for his matchless English eloquence-the Bible and Shakespeare. If a man reads these two books, and Burns, and Scott, and Kipling, and cannot write that which is good after, he had better get into the literary senate at once.

Now every writing has two distinct values the immediate, or cash value, which is always small, because of the rapacity of editors, and the future, or reputation-building value.

As soon as a tale is printed, it begins to earn for the writer something-the character of that something will depend upon the amount of ability, and truthful, honest work the author has put into it. The prospective value is by far the greater to the young writer, and should be kept severely in view.

I admit it is difficult to keep the mind firmly fixed on a crown of laurel in a matter of forty years, while the stomach is clamouring for a present instalment of beans, or cabbage or anything nice and warm and filling. But there is little hope unless the laurel can be kept somewhere in the corner of the eye. It does not much matter whether

the tale be sad or gay, for there is much sweet sadness in life, so long as it be wholly truthful and of use, the workmanship the best the author can give.

This spirit of truth and strength breathes throughout the work of the present master of fiction, Kipling. Shall we shrink from his writing because of the almost barbaric fidelity to truth which is true? Then shall we shrink from the Bible, and ask for a more genteel book to mould our lives upon. Truth may jar sometimes, but the fault is ours, not truth's. It is this sublime fealty to truth which has made Kipling the greatest living writer.

And, in a lesser degree, we have an immediate proof of this in the splendid book Steevens has given us, called, "With Kitchener to Khartum." Kipling's work has made the writing of this book possible and profitable. And if we hark back along this line of truth or realism-healthy realism, we shall presently come to Dickens. was the father of this good school that is breathing of health to-day.

He

But to return to Steevens' book, for I wish to speak a little of it. In it we find passages that make men bless the land of their nativity; thank God that they, too, are Britons, as they read. Is that not good literature? Yes, it is. But it is not smothered in fine writing.

And of the Arabs he speaks with fine admiration. One picture I remember. The rifles and quick-firing machine guns of the white troops had mowed down three thousand of the desert-dwellers as they charged the British lines. At last there were but three Arabs living. These still stuck to the colours, and advanced against the whole European force. The guns belched forth again, and but one was left. He raised his spear on high, and, shouting "Allah! Allah!" charged as though he had ten thousand men at his back.

That is what we want in our literature-more simplicity and faith. More "Allah! Allah !"

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