But remember, after all has been said and done, this is the Great Lone Land. Emigration here is but a drop in the ocean as regards results. I am now some 850 miles to the north-west of Winnipeg. The country is an unbroken level, and, with the exception of Brandon and Moose Jaw, you see hardly a farmhouse, hardly any ploughed land, no sheep grazing on the downs, no herds fattening in the prairie; not a single tree to hide one from the snows of winter or the suns of summer. By day you melt in the sun, by night you shiver with the cold. When we came to a swamp now and then we saw a few wild ducks. Once in the course of the weary ride we saw two or three deer. All the rest was a parched plain, with here and there some lovely flowers, and with buffalo bones bleaching wherever you turn your eye. In some parts the soil was strongly impregnated with alkali, so much so, indeed, that it made the ground white, and left a crust of what looked like ice on the lakes and ponds. Can that huge region ever grow wheat and fatten flocks? The experience of the experimental farms proves that it will. All I know is that ages must elapse before Moose Jaw shall be a Manchester, or Brandon, in spite of its many advantages, the headquarters of the agricultural interest, with a corn market equalling that of Norwich or Ipswich. Yet there are parts of Manitoba which contain undoubtedly as fine corn-growing country as any in the world. This is especially true of the new tract of country opened up by the Canadian Pacific in the south-west. As a rule, the further from the railway the land is, the better it is. At the same time, it is to be remembered that a farmer who has no railway access is at a great disadvantage, and that in the winter it is no joke sending a man with a team of oxen and a waggon-load of produce twenty or thirty miles across the prairie, where a snowstorm, or ‘a blorrard’ at any time, may occur.