From the piles of pelts dumped by Indians and hunters outside the old Hudson Bay stockade at Fort Garry, and the sacks of raw grain that the old prairie schooners brought in, Winnipeg of today has grown up. And it has grown up with the astonishing, swift maturity of the West. Fifty years ago there was not even a village. Forty years ago it was a mere spot on the world map, put there only to indicate the locality of Louis Kiel's Red River Rebellion, and Wolseley's march to Fort Garry, as its name was. In 1881 it became just Winnipeg, a townlet with less than 8,000 souls in it. Today it ranks with the greatest commercial cities in Canada, and its greatness can be felt in the tingling energy of its streets. The wonder of that swift growth is a thing that can be brought directly home. I stood on the station with a man old but still active, and he said to me: "Do you see that block of buildings over there? I had the piece of ground on which it was built. I sold it for a hundred dollars, it was prairie then. It's worth many thousands now. And that piece where that big factory stands, that was mine. I let that go for under three hundred, and the present owners bought in the end for twenty and more times that sum. Oh, we were all foolish then, how could we tell that Winnipeg was going to grow? It was a 'back-block' town, shacks along a dusty track. And the railway hadn't come. A three-story wooden house, that was a marvel to be sure; now we have skyscrapers." And fast though Winnipeg has grown, or because she has grown at such a pace, one can still see the traces and feel the spirit of the old spacious days in her streets. They are long streets and so planned that they seem to have been built by men who knew that there were no limits on the immense plains, and so broad that one knows that the designers had been conscious that there was no need to pinch the sidewalks and carriage-ways with all the prairie at the back of them. Along these sumptuous avenues there still remain many of the low-built and casual houses that men put up in the early days, and it is these standing beside the modernity of the business buildings, soaring sky-high, the massive grain elevators and the big brisk mills that give the city its curious blending of pioneer days and thrusting, twentieth-century virility. It is a town like no other that we had visited, and where one had the feeling that up-to-date card-indexing systems were being worked by men in the woolly riding chaps of old plainsmen. In the people of the streets one experienced the same curious sense of "difference." In splendid boulevards such as Main, and Portage, which turns from it, there are stores worthy of New York and London in size, smartness and glowing attraction. And the women crowds that make these streets busy are as crisply dressed in modern fashions as any on the Continent, but there is a definite individuality in the air of the men.