TO borrow a threadbare but expressive phrase, “Wheat is king,” in Saskatchewan. Go where one will, in the inhabited part of the province, one is never allowed to forget this. One travels through miles on miles of wheat fields, and the most conspicuous building at many a wayside station is a giant “elevator”—if there does not chance, indeed, to be a row of these. Every budding town seems to begin with an agricultural implement “depot”; and near the railway stations in the cities self-binders, gasoline engines, and threshing machines, gaudy with yellow and crimson paint, are drawn up, awaiting their purchasers, by the hundred. Nor is this the only token of the empire of King Wheat! In train and city, as well as at the tables of the farmers, the talk is of weather—good or bad—for the sowing and the harvest, for in Saskatchewan every man, woman and child realizes that in the last analysis the dependence of the whole community is on the measure of success which attends the cultivation of the soil. Wheat is king; and as in the old days every road led to Rome, so in writing of Saskatchewan—though this is true to a certain extent of most of the Canadian provinces—it is impossible to avoid coming back again and again to the farmer and his crops and his doings, his difficulties and his successes, and his way of meeting all kinds of problems. Here at least he is the hero of the drama—the central figure in the picture, and therefore I shall make no apology for seeming to travel in a circle. Let us speak first of the kingdom of wheat. Saskatchewan, in the south, has a breadth of three hundred and ninety miles, and a length of about seven hundred and fifty miles, or an area of somewhat over a quarter of a million square miles, including a water surface of about eight thousand three hundred miles, made up chiefly of lakes, large and small. It is larger than France, and over twice the size of the British Isles, with which it roughly corresponds in latitude. Edinburgh, by the way, is further north than any part of Saskatchewan yet settled, and the northern boundary of the province—the 60th parallel of north latitude—touches the two European capitals, Christiania of Norway and St. Petersburg of Russia.