The pleasant steamship journey ended, I landed at Port Arthur—a town situated in one of the loveliest bays I have yet seen, almost surrounded by weird and fantastic rocks—with a view to run by the Canadian Pacific as far as Winnipeg. As I landed a bill met my eye: ‘Wanted, a hundred rock-men and fifty labourers;’ and that seemed to me an indication that emigrants need not go begging for work in that particular locality. Port Arthur, which stands near the ancient Hudson Bay Company’s station of Fort William, was in a state of intense activity. Every one was building wooden houses and shops who could do so. According to all appearances, it is certainly a busy place; but architecturally I cannot say that it is of much account. The main street opens on to the railway, along which the engines, ringing a doleful bell in order to bid passengers keep out of the way, pass every few minutes. Then there are wooden shops and wooden hotels, and the usual concourse of rough, unwashed, half-dressed loafers in the streets. Behind them is the forest and in front the bay, with its waters almost as clear as those of the Baltic, and almost as blue as those of Naples. Yet I certainly got very heartily tired of Port Arthur, and so, I am sure, did all my travelling companions, who sat on the planks or on the wooden pavement, which, being raised above the road, made passable seats, or on the bits of rock which the railway builders had been too busy to remove, wondering at what hour the train would start. I pitied the poor emigrants, with their children, and their beds, and their household furniture, as they sat there, hour after hour, in that hot and sandy street. We landed at eleven, having made the whole distance from Toronto—a run of about eight hundred miles—in exactly two days and two nights—not quite so long as Jonah was in the whale’s belly, but we certainly got over more ground than he did. When were we to start? No one knew. It takes a long time to get out £4,000 worth of freight and passengers’ luggage, and that is what the _Algoma_ had on board. The worst of railway travelling in Canada is that there is no one of whom you can ask a question. There may be a station-master, there may be a whole herd of officials, there may be an army of porters, but Canadians in one respect resemble the Americans—and that is, that they think it inconsistent with their manly dignity to wear any kind of garb which can in any possible way distinguish them from the crowd of lookers-on, always to be met with in a railway station, so that the railway traveller is always in a perplexity. When we got on shore we were told that we should start in half an hour. Then came word that we were to be off at half-past one, and so, as soon as the cars were made up, we joyfully climbed into them—and the steps are in many cases so high that it is hard work climbing into them; but still we were no further on