"I trust you and dad and the girls are in the pink. To-day I have bought a pair of horses, a grey and a sort of blonde, and have named them Tempest and Kruger. Rather jolly names, don't you think? "From the address mentioned above, you will see that I am writing this from Saskatoon. It is a bare spot, and was not of much importance before we Barr Colonists came. It is merely a score or so of glorified packing-cases sitting bleakly on the prairie beneath a great blue arch of sky, and ringed about with a distant horizon clear-cut as the edge of a silhouette. The South Saskatchewan River, which just now is gorged with, and vomiting, great blocks of ice, runs close by. The town (as they call it here) is threaded on the railway line which connects Regina with Prince Albert, pretty much as a small, dirty-coloured bead is strung on a bit of wire. "The Canadians, mother, seem to have an odd way of disfiguring a patch of their otherwise decent country. In Yorkshire, when the inhabitants wish to ruin some lovely landscape, they sink a coal-pit, and, if that fails, build a blast furnace. In London, as you well know, they rely more on slums for miasmal effects. Out here, apparently, they nail a few boards together, call it a town, and the ghastly work is done. "And this fiercely searching Canadian sunlight shows everything up so. Why, there was actually a dead dog stretched out on a vacant piece of ground beside one of the shops where I purchased some stuff to-day. Probably a dead dog is an object of veneration in these parts, but I hardly think so, because on this particular waste patch there was a big signboard planted, bearing the words--THIS LOT FOR SALE. "If there is such a place as purgatory, mother--and I know you deny it--Barr is galloping there fast. He has stepped rather heavily on the crooked end of this scheme of his, and the other end has tipped up and dealt him an awful whack in the face. "His plans are boomeranging dangerously. The party is out here, and that's about all one can say. Right at this moment, in the next tent to my own, a matter of ten yards away perhaps, there are two men--and two wives, presumably--screaming at one another with rage over what they persist in calling, in their queer dialect, 'Barr's perfidery.' It is excruciatingly funny. "As for me, I'm tolerably well pleased with everything so far. I've adopted a partner. Sam Potts is his name--an awfully decent little chap, and smart as a whip. In his own vulgar way he is a gentleman, though not the least bit educated. And yet he seems to know a great deal. He is energetic, uglier than some sins, very irreligious, for he swears terribly, but tremendously amusing. You'll hear more about him from me, I dare say.