[Illustration:  The Hudson’s Bay Store]

Vermilion is the centre of prairie and rolling timber-land greater in extent than the whole of Belgium.  There are probably a million acres of land immediately tributary to the place, all capable of producing crops like those cited.  Within a radius of ten miles of the H.B. post there are living now five hundred people of whom perhaps fifty are white.  They all to some extent cultivate the soil, varying their farm operations by hunting, trapping, and freighting.  The settlement boasts two churches, two mission schools, and two trading stores,—­a happy, prosperous, and very progressive community.  Everything in the place points to this conclusion.

The H.B.  Company here, in addition to buying beaver-skins and growing $1.25 wheat and grinding flour and importing big red binders, breaks the monotony by running a sawmill and building modern steamboats.  This sawmill turned out all the lumber for the new steamer Peace River, built here four years ago of native timber.  She is a hundred and ten-foot stern-wheeler with twenty-two-foot beam, drawing two and a half feet and carrying forty tons burden.  She can accommodate thirty passengers in comfortable cabins, and when going with the current, makes fifteen knots an hour.  The sawmill which turned out the timbers for this boat has a capacity of fifteen thousand feet a day.

Within this mill I took, at random, the record sheet of one raft of one man’s logs for the spring of 1906, cut in the immediate vicinity of Vermilion and floated along the Peace to the mill.  Edmond Paul’s logs in one raft gave a total of two hundred and eighty-eight logs, which cut at the mill 27,029 board feet of lumber.  The biggest log in this raft was a twelve-foot log with twenty-six inches diameter at the small end, which cut three hundred and sixty-three feet of lumber.

Vermilion in its soil fertility, its modernism, culture, and arrived-ness is a source of recurring marvel and pleasure.  If a handful of people four hundred miles from a railway, as the crow flies, and seven hundred miles by actual practicable trails, can accomplish what has been done, into what status of producing activity will this whole country spring when it is given rail communication with the plains-people to the south?

Waiting for steamboat connection, we are for weeks in this glorious autumn weather, guests in the hospitable home of Mr. and Mrs. Wilson.  Can we ever forget the generous kindness extended to us within these walls?  Months of travel in open scows, sleeping on the ground, and stretching out in blankets on the decks of little tugs have prepared us to enjoy to the full the comforts of a cultured home.  It is a modern house, with beds of old-fashioned pansies and sweet-Williams and rows of hollyhocks on all sides.  The upper verandah affords a view of the Peace, here fully a mile in width, of incomparable beauty.  To the visitor who steps over its threshold, Mr. Wilson’s