brilliant deep red sash heavily embroidered with beads, porcupine quills and dyed moose hair, placed it over the Prince's left shoulder and knotted it under his right arm. The ceremony was ended. We passed through enormous stretches of grain-land. Grain elevators are wonderful things; they seem to be uncanny in the way they separate the grain from the chaff, pack the grain into sacks, and lower the sacks into large boats waiting for them. From Vermillion Bay to Pyne there were continuous lakes, mostly unnamed. We stopped at Kenora, on the Lake of the Woods. Beautiful flowers were growing down to the lake. It is a great place for the Winnipeg people to spend their week-ends. About this part it is very dusty; it is better never to face the dust, but to take it, if possible, in the back. At Winnipeg we were met by Sir James Aikins and his daughter, and M. and R., who were looking not a day older than when they left England. They had just returned from a holiday at Kenora. We went to Government House, and I was very glad to go to bed in my charming room; and I loved having my breakfast in bed next morning of grape fruit, toast and coffee, and a bunch of sweet peas tucked into a corner of the tray. September 6.-Started at eleven o'clock with Sir James, G., and H., to the City Park, 600 acres of beautiful grounds with good pavilion, tennis courts and a sort of zoological garden ; saw a splendid buffalo, fox, moose, deer, badgers, bears, golden pheasants, hawks and many other animals, a herd of deer looking splendid. Winnipeg is enormous, with very fine broad roads and great houses. After lunch we went to see the Parliament Buildings. I have never seen anything I like better for a modern building. A glorious entrance hall of marble and grey stone which comes from sixty miles away; it is the most lovely colour. On either side of the wide marble staircase, standing on high pedestals, are, in dull green bronze, two buffaloes, more than life size; the beasts are magnificent. There are about twelve or fourteen steps, then a wide landing and another flight of steps. On the top of the stairs you enter a mysterious-looking door-a bolted and barred effect-into the Legislative Chamber. As I stood in the hall and saw the lovely soft grey of it all, I said to G., ' Blue is the right colour here '; and when we entered the Chamber I saw a twin soul had seen eye to eye with me, for the carpets, the leather seats and chairs, all were covered with the most beautiful Chinese blue. The Prince of Wales's chair, on which he sat when he was in Winnipeg, was also blue. The Chamber is perfectly round, and the President's chair is a lovely Empire sort of throne; the lamps round the Chamber, in alcoves, are beautiful late Empire. Every detail had been carried out splendidly. The great spaces of the buildings are extraordinary, but it must be seen to be understood. I felt if I had been Mr. Simon and had done work like that, I should never dare to know myself again, but gaze on my genius as something quite apart. He is a charming man and very modest, and he will never do anything better. I hear there had been a great deal of feeling about these Parliament Buildings; they had cost over two millions sterling. Lady A. had a big reception in the afternoon, and a dinnerparty in the evening, all nice cheery people. Lady A. will get interested in the Guides, I think, and her girls will help her. G. was speaking at the Canadian Club on 'The Aftermath of the War.' We went after lunch to hear him; they all seemed very pleased. Afterwards we went to an At Home, and met endless people, and then had a rush back to get ready to depart; but a large dinner-party came first. An amusing judge sat by me, and, having told him how lovely I thought the Parliament Buildings, he said, They'll do for a hundred years all right.' I said, 'Our house at home is over four hundred and twenty years old.' All he said was, ' Ought to have been pulled down long ago.' After they had gone we changed our clothes and wished Lady A. and her girls good-bye, some of the kindest people we have met. Sir James took us to the station, where M. met us. We were photographed by flashlight in the car, and said good-bye, and then we went to bed as soon as we could. September 8.-The country is vast, and we passed through the grain prairies. In the distance I saw a high gold heap and, ascending from it, clouds of golden smoke; it was a threshing machine piling up the golden grain into a heap of 20 to 30 feet in height, and the chaff flying away in a gorgeous smoke. M. told us these men who work the machine (about twelve of them) go from farm to farm with the machine and a caboose to sleep in. The farmers' wives have to cook and provide the food, and they eat enormously and earn from five to eight dollars a day, not bad for a working man. The country began to get more hilly and was fascinating to watch, the vast plains green and gold in the sun, and the blue sky overhead looks so much more virtuous than in Africa, but not so wonderful. Again I sat on the observation platform and took lessons in perspective, absolutely straight lines to the vanishing point. The line was wonderful, begun at Vancouver and, I think, Montreal at the same time, and after five years they met, Lord Strathcona linking them together about forty years ago. Passed Tomkins. The elevators were lighted up by the sun, and looked like huge electric lamps; all the farmhouses were white, and the barns red with white windows. I should have taken a barn; they VOL. XCIV-No. 562 3 M were much larger than the houses, and looked cheery and bright. The country was very like the Wiltshire downs. The names were queer as we went along. Moose Jaw. The Indian name means a creek where the white man mended the cart with a moose jawbone.' Medicine Hat.-The town is heated and lighted by natural gas; it warms the house, cooks the food, and lights the house at fourteen dollars thirty cents a month. As we left the town in a blaze of its own making the Northern Light was sending up to a sky of royal blue a glorious column of brilliant white light. September 9.-We arrived at Banff about nine o'clock. First came the approach of the hills, which were to swell into mountains; it was lovely, with pines, spruce, white birches and tamarisk all beginning to colour, and here and there a blaze of orange red and gold; and as we got nearer Banff a river ran along with us, turquoise blue and green. ESTELLA CAVE. THE MISTLETOE The trees.. forlorn and lean, O'ercome with moss and baleful mistletoe. SHAKESPEARE. It is rather extraordinary, when one comes to think of it, that though mistletoe has always been associated with Christmas festivities and decorations at home, yet it is never used to celebrate the religious side of the festival. Every hall, house, or cottage may have its bunch of mistletoe hanging, with its sly reminder of love and kisses, but never a leaf or berry is seen in our churches; its use therein is never suggested. This is the more extraordinary since, apparently, there is no law laid down in the matter, nor is there any written pronouncement regarding the point; the practice rests on age-old custom, backed up by an innate, if indefinable, sense of the unsuitability of the plant in Christian service, for round it has always hung a subtle atmosphere of uncanniness, of wizardry, almost of unholiness, that makes it incompatible with rejoicings over the birth of the little Christ-child and the belief in purity incarnate. Now why should this be? Why should mistletoe, which is really an interesting and comely little plant in itself, have this curious and sinister atmosphere ? In the first place, undoubtedly, cumulative tradition has much to do with it, and we are still unconsciously under the sway of a ban laid down for a special reason in the earliest days of our country's story. The mistletoe started by being the most venerated of plants in this land. It was the sacred plant of the Druid priests, who, at the winter solstice, went out ceremonially with a golden sickle to cut it from the oaks in their groves of worship; then with sacrifices, human and animal, it was used in the celebration of their great festival, which fell when our Christmas does now, their chief deity Tutanes being probably the equivalent of the god Baal of the Phoenicians. Branches of the sacred plant were then taken by their young men and distributed to the people to announce the coming of the New Year, these branches being afterwards hung up in the dwellings to ward off evil spirits. Thus the origin of the hanging up of the mistletoe goes back to the mists of antiquity. A century ago a quaint survival, p this custom was recorded as still lingering in certa France, where, on New Year's Day, the boys went-a still go-round from house to house asking for mistleto cry 'Aguilaneuf'--that is,' A gui [gui = Fr. mistletoe] (To the mistletoe; 'tis the New Year'). Whether t at that time retained any significance, and if so, what, is Thus the mistletoe was an integral part of the black Druid religion, and indissolubly bound up with heather so when Christianity lighted up the darkness of the land, thing connected with the old ways was sternly discour this plant, associated in men's minds with idolatr sacrifice and witchcraft, shared in the general condemn later, in the general abhorrence in which all was held tha involved in Druidic ritual. Hence from the earliest Chri the mistletoe has been held as barred from all place in worship, the first definite teaching as to the necessity for breakage from idolatry merging eventually into trad custom of which the meaning has been lost. It is rather remarkable that in the Anglo-Saxon her is absolutely no mention of the mistletoe as a sacred plant there is hardly any allusion of any sort to the plants ven the Druids. Then, again, the 'baleful' mistletoe, as Shakespeare derived a certain amount of its sinister atmosphere legends of the Norsemen, where it stands as the agen destruction of Balder the Beautiful—the sun-god. The s that Balder, the son of Odin and Frigga, dreamed that hi threatened and that he would shortly die. So Frigga upon all living things to swear not to harm her son, but looked the insignificant mistletoe growing on the oak at of Valhalla. One day the gods were at play, and with laug sport they began to cast missiles of all sorts at Balder, him immune from injury. But Loki, his secret enemy, covered the omission of the mistletoe from the oath, so he shaft from its wood and gave it to Balder's brother, blind to throw. Hother threw boldly, but, to his horror, ins laughter there was a shriek, and Balder fell. So on the floor lay Balder dead; and round |