No further evidence is, I think, needed; but, by way of completing the ascent of my “ladder,” I will invite the reader to move in imagination some thirty miles nearer the North Pole, to Fort Simpson (lat. 61.8°)—the most remote point from which I have been enabled to glean any gardening news. Mr. Hardisty, the late chief factor in charge of the Hudson Bay post, told Mr. Macoun that melons, if started under glass, ripened well there, frost seldom doing them harm. Barley, Mr. Hardisty added, always ripened at Fort Simpson. Another witness is accessible in the person of Mr. William Ogilvie, the explorer. “While at this post,” he reported, “we enjoyed the fine potatoes, carrots, parsnips, cabbage and peas grown in the Hudson Bay Company’s garden. They were as large and as fine flavoured as the best in any part of the country.” The facts being as I have stated, no wonder some enterprising pioneers have “gone in advance of the railway,” and settled in that part of the Peace River district lying around Lesser Slave Lake and to the west of it. News of the high farming value of the Great North Lands will, I think, come upon the public as a surprise. Yet, as has recently been pointed out by Mr. R. E. Young (Canada’s Superintendent of Railway Lands), the truth of the matter has for long been demonstrated inferentially by the experience of another quarter of the globe. On a map of Western Canada, Mr. Young has superimposed the highly productive Russian province of Tobolsk, in its accurate position as to latitude; and, behold! the main southern boundary of Tobolsk occurs (on the map of the Dominion) a good deal north of settled Southern Alberta, while northern Tobolsk extends right up the Canadian mainland, crosses Coronation Gulf, and spreads some way over Victoria Island. Recent statistics about the Russian province are not available to me; but in 1906 it was supporting a population of over a million and a half, in 1907 it was producing 30,770,000 bushels of wheat, rye, barley and oats, it raises many million head of livestock, and from one district alone (Kurgan) there was exported in 1902, largely to Great Britain, 19,711,446 lbs. of butter. I may add, on the authority of the British Blue Book from which the last-named figures are taken, that dairy-farming in Tobolsk promised, at the date of publication (1905), a marvellous development. [Illustration: BOW RIVER, ALBERTA PROVINCE] As I have already mentioned, certain enterprising and discerning mortals have gone into the productive North Lands ahead of the locomotive. Mr. Alfred Von Hamerstein, for instance, who was on his way to the Klondike in 1897, changed his mind, and opened a store at Athabasca Landing. He traded with the Indians, and it is interesting to learn that his customers were keen to buy different kinds of seeds; so he added flower-seeds to his stock, “and some lovely flowers were raised.”