I can't lose this mail after having taken so long about my last letter. But it will scarcely be more than How d'you do? How are you? I'm all right! Well, that's better than nothing, anyhow. I have, as you see, again changed my location, whether advantageously or otherwise I cannot as yet say. But this Capital of Canada is a miserable little place. The railway station is very little better than a shed in a field, and the road from there to the town--oh, "golly!"--a train off the rails is nothing to it. I came up in the hotel 'bus, and though I tried all I knew to sit firm and not let daylight be seen betwixt me and my saddle, I was jumped about like a dancing-master, and I hammered those cushions till I thought of claiming a week's pay from the hotel for beating the dust out of them. However, I did'nt; so I am still here. There is one good thing I have done in coming here, I have reached the head and source of the immigration question. I can get an unprejudiced opinion as to the very best spots in the place--that is, settling spots--and also various items of information which all tend, more or less, to the endorsement of this moral: Let no professional men, of any sort, 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.