We left Winnipeg on Wednesday (20th) and travelled all day through rough rolling ground, very rocky and sprinkled with my friends--boulder-clay, morainic gravel and sand, and large erratics. The country was upon the whole rather dreary, dense thickets of spruce fir covering the rocky knolls, and swamps and morasses lying in the hollows. Here and there where the ground was more open the prairie flowers flourished, and butterflies and dragon-flies fluttered and darted about in the sunshine. Night overtook us while we were still in the same monotonous country. A number of British Ass. folk had joined us at Winnipeg, among them Prof. Ramsay,[4] a nephew of _my_ Prof. R. The night we passed in the sleeping-car, and next morning found us still sweeping along through the same kind of forest land. Very fine evidence of ice-work was seen all the way--just like what I know in Wester Ross and Sutherland. We breakfasted at a rough station in those dreary backwoods. Houses are few and far apart in such a desolate region, and I can’t see how the railway can ever pay. We passed over 1000 miles of land, most of which seemed to me as barren and hopeless as the poorest tracts of the Outer Hebrides. The trees are small miserable sticks, and everywhere one sees rising above these small trees tall ragged and naked trunks, marked with fire, showing that much forest land must have been destroyed by fire in earlier days. We stopped at last at Port Arthur, at the upper end of Lake Superior, where we spent the day and night. This is a small backwoods town of some 2000 or 3000 inhabitants. The view over Thunder Bay is fine, and I enjoyed a walk into the country. [4] Later Sir William Ramsay. Next day the party sailed down the lakes to Owen Sound and took train for Toronto. From here Niagara was visited, and after that the journey continued to Montreal.