For the sake of intending emigrants let me dispel a couple of popular errors. One that the heat is most enjoyable; another, that it is a cheap country to come to. Neither assertion is exactly the truth. As I write the heat is insufferable, and yet this is early spring. I saw snow yesterday in a hollow of the hills not yet melted, and last night, sleeping in a stuffy Pullman car full of people, I was awoke with the cold. The other fallacy which I would expose is that this is a cheap country. On the contrary, it is nothing of the kind. Paxton Hood, if I remember aright, once gave a lecture on America under the title of the ‘Land of the Big Dollar.’ If I were to lecture on Canada I should call it the ‘Land of the Little Dollar.’ A dollar here is of no account. This morning I went into a shop and had a bottle of ginger-beer, and the cost was one shilling; and this, too, after I had been administering a little ‘soft sawder’ to the fair American damsel who waited on me (she was from Michigan, and was remarkably wide awake), in the mistaken hope that she would be a little reasonable in her charge. Everyone smokes cigars all day long, and yet Canadian cigars are as costly as they are atrocious. Fortunately one can’t spend money in drink, as that is prohibited, and the chemists at Calgary have recently got into a scrape for supplying customers with essence of lemon, by means of which they manage to fuddle themselves. The price of fruit is prohibitory; cucumbers, such as you in London would give three halfpence for, are here at Calgary as much as a shilling. Eggs are four shillings a dozen; meat and bacon and ham are as dear as in England, and not a quarter so good. I am appalled as I see how the money goes; I fear to be stranded at the foot of the Rockies. If I get back to the west I shall have to work my passage back to England as fireman or stoker, or in some such ignoble capacity. If I was younger I would turn gardener. I believe anyone who would come out here with sufficient capital to plant a nursery ground or to stock a good fruit garden would make a lot of money, as the farmers, of course, do not think of such things, and the supply is quite unequal to the demand. In Calgary they did not have three inches of frost all last winter. It is true they have even now a sharp nip of frost; but I hear of peas flourishing at a farmer’s close by, and the region abounds with wild strawberries and raspberries and cherries. If they grow wild, surely they will equally prosper under more careful culture.