[Illustration:  A Section of Edmonton]

We walk Edmonton streets for ten days and see neither an old man nor an old woman.  The government and the business interests are in the hands of young people who have adopted modern methods of doing things; single tax is the basis of taxation; the city owns its public utilities, including an interurban street railroad, electric lighting plant, water-works, and the automatic telephone.  Mr. C.W.  Cross, the Attorney-General of Alberta, is the youngest man in Canada to hold that high office.  During the first session of the first legislature of this baby province less than three years ago, an enabling act was passed for a university.  Nowhere else have I been sensible of such a feeling of united public-spiritedness as obtains here.

Down in the river valley are hundreds of people living under canvas, not because they are poor but because building contractors cannot keep pace with the demand for homes.  As we pass these tents, we are rude enough to look in.  Most of them are furnished with telephones and the city water; here a bride bends over a chafing dish; another glance discloses an oil-painting that was once shown in the Royal Academy.  From the next tent float the strains of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, and, as we stop to listen, a gentleman and his wife step out.  An auto picks them up and off they whirl to Jasper Avenue.  The Lord o’ the Tents of Shem disappears into his bank and Milady drives on to the Government house to read before the Literary Club a paper on Browning’s Saul.  To the tenderfoot from the South it is all delightfully disconcerting—­oxen and autos and Browning on the Saskatchewan!

The Sunday before we leave Edmonton I find another set of tents, put up by the Immigration Department, where East-End Londoners are housed pending their going out upon the land.  In the first call I make I unearth a baby who rejoices in the name of Hester Beatrice Cran.  “H.B.C.,” I remark, “aren’t you rather infringing on a right, taking that trade-mark?” Quick came the retort, “Ho!  If she gets as good a ’old on the land as the ’Udson’s Bay Company ’as, she’ll do!”

Another lady in the next tent proudly marshalled her olive branches.  “D’isy and the baiby were born in the Heast Hend.  They’re Henglish; please God they’ll make good Canaidians.  They’re tellin’ me, miss, there’ll be five ’undred more of us on the ‘igh seas comin’ out to Hedmonton from the Heast Hend, all poor people like ourselves.  I often wonder w’y they don’t bring out a few dukes to give the country a touch of ’igh life—­it’s very plain ’ere.”