and they entertain a warm friendly feeling towards "the States." In the larger cities the Fourth of July is informally but generally observed as a holiday. British Columbia is of immense size. It is as extensive as the combination of New England, the Middle States and Maryland, the Virginias, the Carolinas, and Georgia, leaving Delaware out. It is larger than Texas, Colorado, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire joined together. Yet it has been all but overlooked by man, and may be said to be an empire with only one wagon road, and that is but a blind artery halting in the middle of the country. But whoever follows this necessarily incomplete survey of what man has found that region to be, and of what his yet puny hands have drawn from it, will dismiss the popular and natural suspicion that it is a wilderness worthy of its present fate. Until the whole globe is banded with steel rails and yields to the plough, we will continue to regard whatever region lies beyond our doors as waste-land, and to fancy that every line of latitude has its own unvarying climatic characteristics. There is an opulent civilization in what we once were taught was "the Great American Desert," and far up at Edmonton, on the Peace River, farming flourishes despite the fact that it is where our school-books located a zone of perpetual snow. Farther along we shall study a country crossed by the same parallels of latitude that dissect inhospitable Labrador, and we shall discover that as great a difference exists between the two shores of the continent on that zone as that which distinguishes California from Massachusetts. Upon the coast of this neglected corner of the world we shall see that a climate like that of England is produced, as England's is, by a warm current in the sea; in the southern half of the interior we shall discover valleys as inviting as those in our New England; and far north, at Port Simpson, just below the down reaching claw of our Alaska, we shall find such a climate as Halifax enjoys.