As he left the Exchange the members switched the chaos of the pit into shouts of a more hearty and powerful volume, and to listen to a crowd of such fully-seasoned lungs doing their utmost in the confined space of a building is an awe-inspiring and terrific experience. The friendliness here was but a "classified sample"--if the Winnipeg Exchange will permit that expression--of the friendliness in bulk he found all over Canada, and which he found in the great West, upon which he was now entering. CHAPTER XIV THE FRINGE OF THE GREAT NORTHWEST SASKATOON AND EDMONTON I From Winnipeg, on the night of September 10th, we pushed steadily northwest, and on the morning of Thursday, the 11th, we were in the open prairie, a new land that is being opened up by the settler. We were travelling too late to see the land under wheat--one of the finest sights in the world, we were told; but all the grain was not in, and we saw threshing operations in progress and big areas covered with the strangely small stocks, the result of the Canadian system of cutting the standing stalk rather high up. In the early night, by Portage la Prairie, we had seen big fires burning in the distance. They were not, as we at first thought, prairie fires, but the homesteader getting rid of the great mounds of stalk left by the threshing, the usual method. In the early morning mist we came upon the big, flat expanse of Horn Lake, near Wynyard, over which flew lines of militaristic duck in wedge formation. The prairies lay about us in a great expanse, dun-brown and rolling. It is a monotonous landscape, and there were few if any trees until we got farther north and west. The little prairie towns appear on the horizon a great distance away, thanks to the big grain elevators alongside the track. The grain elevators in these plains are what churches are in Europe; they have, indeed, the look of being basilicas of a new, materialistic dispensation. The little towns under the elevators seem palpably to be struggling with the inert force of the prairie about them. Prairie seems to be flowing into them on every side, and only by a brave effort do houses and streets raise themselves above the encroaching sea of grass. Yet all the towns have a modern air, too. All have excellent electric light services in houses and streets, and all have "movie" theatres. At the stations crowds were gathered. At Wynyard all the young of the district appeared to have collected before going to school. Catching the word that the Prince "lived" in the last car, they swarmed round it. Some one told them the Prince was still in bed, and with the utmost cheerfulness they began to chant: "Sleepy head! Sleepy head!"