more money will have to be spent on draining the land if it is to be any good for farming. Or it may be covered with trees that want stumping out, or the good surface soil may be very shallow and ten years of cropping will exhaust it, or there may be a dozen other things that will depreciate the value of the land.” Again there is that danger of “long-range speculation.” The projected railway may never become a reality. The station within four miles of your farm may exist only in the imagination. You may have to cart your stuff not four miles, but seven or ten miles, and the extra cost of cartage and of labour will considerably reduce the margin of profit. You may be fifty miles from a populous town which offers a market for produce other than wheat, and if you want to succeed in Canada it is well not to put all your eggs into the wheat basket, but to have dairying, chicken and egg-raising, and market gardening as other resources. No English farmer ought to buy land until, in the company of an experienced Canadian farmer, he has thoroughly examined it and studied its capabilities. The English investor, knowing nothing about Canadian acreage values and still more ignorant about the actual value of lots offered to him on this particular acreage investment proposition, should not risk his money without expert advice from the district. Such expert advice is usually to be had, though of course it has to be paid for, but no money is better spent than that spent in gaining such knowledge. This chapter on Real Estate is written in no unfriendly spirit to the Real Estate men. I am convinced that many of those whom I met, both those dealing in town sites and those dealing in acreage, were men of sound judgment and good commercial honesty; but business is business, and the principle in the minds of a large number of the Canadian Real Estate men generally is _caveat emptor_—“let the buyer keep his eyes skinned—my business is to sell. I have to make my profit—it is the buyer’s business to take care that he makes his. If the land is not what he expected that is his look out—he must find somebody else as simple as himself to relieve him of it.” * * * * * CHAPTER VIII THE HOMES OF CANADA