For the last week we had been out on the real plains. Nothing bigger there than herb plant or tiny rose-bush--grass, grass, everlasting grass, everywhere. Like ocean waves the plain dipped and rose. What gorgeous sunsets we witnessed; what surpassingly beautiful sunrises we beheld as we steadily pushed out on this great upland ocean of grass and plain. And those wonderful mirages, who can describe them? Here was photography on a magnificent scale. Here was direct substantiation of the old assertion, "There is no new thing under the sun." The focusing of light, the developing processes of the chemical properties of the atmosphere, verily we may believe these have been at work, if not before, at any rate ever since the "morning stars sang together." I had never until now launched out on the treeless plains. Though in the prairie country for five years of constant travel, yet this is my first trip into this bigness and wideness and strangeness of land and grass and mirage. By the agencies of the latter I have seen the facsimile of an immense district of country lifted into the heavens, and there upon atmospheric canvas were clearly reproduced hill and dale and stream, and herds of buffalo and camps of Indians. I believe I have seen in this way photographs of scenes that were from ten miles to six hundred distant from me. I have noticed that where this occurs there is a distinct condition of atmosphere and climate. It would seem as if a mysterious change were going on, and one could feel this in himself. One day, after a thunder-storm had passed, my wife and I were driving on the high land near the Red Deer River. The sun had come out clear and bright, and presently the whole country was under the spell of a mirage. We were one hundred and fifty miles from the mountains, but these were brought near to us--so close they seemed that, as our horses trotted along the highway, we felt as if we were driving right into them. Watching the wonderful panorama, I saw away beyond the mountains, and there was a body of water, with land and hills in the far background. Then on the water there came in view a steamship. There she stood on her course with a dark cloud of smoke falling astern. I said to my wife, "What do you see?" "Why," she exclaimed, "I see a big lake, and there is a steamer coming towards us." All this was real to our vision and sense. And if truly a picture of this world, that mirage was revealing to our vision scenes seven hundred miles distant. It had lifted those mountains thousands of feet into the heavens and drawn them within the scope of our natural sight. Verily this is a strange, mysterious world, even this wherein we now dwell.