Sir Sandford Fleming, the engineer, who came west in 1872 to spy out a route for the promised railway, took thirty-six days of hard riding, over forty miles a day, to reach the foothills of the Rocky Mountains from the Red River. Eleven years later, as he tells us, he made the trip by Canadian Pacific in fifty-six hours. To-day a traveller by the same railway does it in thirty hours. We shall cover three or four times that distance in thirty minutes. We rise from the sea where the sun has a habit of setting, and steer for the coast explored by Captain Cook. At the foot of Vancouver Island we hover above the Jewel City, the city of flowers, Victoria. Do you smell the roses? A gem of architecture, the Parliament Building of British Columbia, rises from its garden on the shore of a land-locked port. Flying over fields of strawberries, we circle a high, wooded hill crowned by a shining watch-tower. From its revolving dome looks out the sleepless Eye of Canada, the priceless telescope, famed among astronomers, busy discovering suns that shone before the world was born. Our practical country is no longer a mere hanger-on of the international brotherhood of science and literature and art. We leap the straits, alive with salmon, and steer for a clump of giant trees, cedars and Douglas fir towering 250 feet in air. Big ships are steering that way too, for those trees are the gateposts of the Dominion. There is a steamer just going in, the fastest on the Pacific. In a few hours her precious cargo of oriental silk will be speeding across the continent from Vancouver by special train. Here is another, coming out, bound for Australia and New Zealand. Here come two more, both laden with grain, one for Japan and the other for England by way of Panama. In twelve months fifty million bushels of prairie wheat have passed through this western gate. That silent ship with a few blue-coated figures on deck—she carries no grain, but every ounce of grain is carried under her protection. The prairie farmer, a thousand miles from salt water, carries on all his business under the sheltering flag of the British fleet. Without that protection a few years ago our wheat trade would have fallen to ruin in a night; the freedom of the seas would have vanished—and with it the freedom of the world. Neither the mother-land herself, nor Canada, nor even the United States, could have sent her army to the rescue, but for the splendid efficiency of the British fleet. We call it an engine of war, but its chief duty and pride is to keep the peace. Its quiet patrol of the sea is the most effective insurance against the risk of war; and for this protection we Canadians pay not one cent. The British blue-jacket is feared only by war-lovers and law-breakers. He is the guardian of the peace at sea, as surely as the policeman is its guardian on land.