The queen reigns not in lonely majesty. Prominent in her court is a royal relative (the three-flowered geum), an orange-red lily (_Philadelphicum_), a scarlet columbine that dances in the breeze, and the evening primrose, with fringed gentian and a campanula among the purples, not to forget the wild bergamot and flax and a mauve convolvulus. In autumn, Manitoba and her sister provinces are aglow with nodding sunflowers, gaillardias, golden rod, Michaelmas daisies, and three kinds of rudbeckia. Thus the wild nosegay of Canada has much in common with the garden bouquet of old England. Manitoba is the smallest and (because it contains Winnipeg) the greatest of the prairie provinces. “It looks like a postage stamp on the map,” I happened to remark to its Prime Minister. “Well, sir,” replied the Hon. R. P. Roblin, with twinkling eyes, “there are half a million people on your postage stamp, and that is but a fraction of the population it is able and destined to maintain. You might report to the English and Scotch farmers that we have over twenty million acres of good agricultural land waiting for them here.” It is, of course, the curious fact that, even in the smallest and most settled of the prairie provinces, oceans of superb land are still going a-begging. The area each year surveyed, and thereby rendered available for occupation, is as large as the area annually appropriated by the arriving stream of settlers. That stream is steadily increasing in volume, and to-day thousands of English and Scotch tenant-farmers, and tens of thousands of their agricultural labourers, are cogitating the question: “Shall we go to Canada?” Some persons counsel that course. Others attempt to dissuade them. But what those hesitating farmers and labourers are conscious of needing is, not advice, but information—and information in the form of definite facts rather than of general statements. It was with this thought in my mind that I had approached Mr. Roblin, who is not merely Premier of Manitoba and its Minister of Agriculture, but one of the foremost living authorities on Canadian farming, his knowledge being based on practical experience in cultivating a large holding in the province. I told Mr. Roblin that I desired an authoritative account of the process known as “breaking the prairie,” and he very kindly supplied me with the following particulars: