The girl from Winnipeg saw the morning frost lie white on the long grass at the lake edges, and watched the haze of mellow golden birch leaves as they dropped. 'Now that's the way trees ought to turn,' she said. 'Don't you think our Eastern maple is a little violent in colour?' Then we passed through a country where for many hours the talk in the cars was of mines and the treatment of ores. Men told one tales--prospectors' yarns of the sort one used to hear vaguely before Klondike or Nome were public property. They did not care whether one believed or doubted. They, too, were only at the beginning of things--silver perhaps, gold perhaps, nickel perhaps. If a great city did not arise at such a place--the very name was new since my day--it would assuredly be born within a few miles of it. The silent men boarded the cars, and dropped off, and disappeared beyond thickets and hills precisely as the first widely spaced line of skirmishers fans out and vanishes along the front of the day's battle. One old man sat before me like avenging Time itself, and talked of prophecies of evil, that had been falsified. '_They_ said there wasn't nothing here excep' rocks an' snow. _They_ said there never _wouldn't_ be nothing here excep' the railroad. There's them that can't see _yit_,' and he gimleted me with a fierce eye. 'An' all the while, fortunes is made--piles is made--right under our noses.' 'Have you made your pile?' I asked. He smiled as the artist smiles--all true prospectors have that lofty smile--'Me? No. I've been a prospector most o' my time, but I haven't lost anything. I've had my fun out of the game. By God, I've had my fun out of it! I told him how I had once come through when land and timber grants could have been picked up for half less than nothing. 'Yes,' he said placidly. 'I reckon if you'd had any kind of an education you could ha' made a quarter of a million dollars easy in those days. And it's to be made now if you could see where. How? Can you tell me what the capital of the Hudson Bay district's goin' to be? You can't. Nor I. Nor yet where the six next new cities is going to arise, I get off here, but if I have my health I'll be out next summer again--prospectin' North.' Imagine a country where men prospect till they are seventy, with no fear of fever, fly, horse-sickness, or trouble from the natives--a country where food and water always taste good! He told me curious things about some fabled gold--the Eternal Mother-lode--out in the North, which is to humble the pride of Nome. And yet, so vast is the Empire, he had never heard the name of Johannesburg!