The total value of the western fur catch in 1924 was $8,798,773, of which $1,970,013 is credited to Alberta, $1,927,914 to Saskatchewan, $1,908,354 to Manitoba, $1,529,376 to the North West Territories, $1,116,037 to British Columbia, and $347,079 to the Yukon. The whole Dominion’s total was $15,643,817, for 4,207,593 pelts, and included $2,542,992 for 169,172 beaver and $3,440,363 for 2,985,395 muskrat. Sometimes a fur farm does not need to be “established”; it establishes itself. On the banks of the Red Deer, away there in the south, you can see—if the telescope is strong enough—a beaver gnawing at a tree. Now he has finished, and skips to one side. Down falls the tree with a crash. The enterprising farmer who owns that land, when he found the beavers coolly colonizing his water-front, adopted them under special licence, and supplements their diet of bark with a dessert of carrots, for which they will presently pay him with their skins. Turning back from these oldest Canadians to the newest, we plunge into the thick of the “Galicians” whom we watched coming in. Twenty years have made a great change here too. Many of the thatched cottages have been abandoned for modern houses, which, however, are scarcely so picturesque. The little plots dug up with a spade and reaped with a scythe have expanded into broad farms worked with the most modern machinery. In agriculture, these “New Canadians” have been more than willing, and many of them keen and quick, to learn the ways of our country. Their natural thriftiness, ingrained by the poverty of bygone days, has largely saved them from branching out in the fatal course of over-ambition. Then the kind of land they have generally settled on, the brush land, has helped to keep them in the safe path of mixed farming. There is something in the woodland that seems to fix a family to the soil with peculiar tenacity—partly, no doubt, because we value most what we have taken most trouble to secure. Then the Slavs have come to us with no idea except to make a permanent home. “In the brush country they can’t be beaten,” says an observer of experience. “It is wonderful,” says another who knows them well, “what a transformation they have made; how they have developed the country as well as their own homes.” Those who live near the unifying railway and the town easily pick up our language, and also have a chance of visiting a “better farming train” and hearing an agricultural lecturer. But the folk away out in the back country, who need most help, get least of it.