Chapter 15

THE FORTUNATE TOWNS

After Politics, let us return to the Prairie which is the High Veldt,
plus Hope, Activity, and Reward. Winnipeg is the door to it--a great
city in a great plain, comparing herself, innocently enough, to other
cities of her acquaintance, but quite unlike any other city.

When one meets, in her own house, a woman not seen since girlhood she is
all a stranger till some remembered tone or gesture links up to the
past, and one cries: 'It _is_ you after all.' But, indeed, the child has
gone; the woman with her influences has taken her place. I tried vainly
to recover the gawky, graceless city I had known, so unformed and so
insistent on her shy self. I even ventured to remind a man of it. 'I
remember,' he said, smiling, 'but we were young then. This thing,'
indicating an immense perspective of asphalted avenue that dipped under
thirty railway tracks, 'only came up in the last ten years--practically
the last five. We've had to enlarge all those warehouses yonder by
adding two or three stories to 'em, and we've hardly begun to go ahead
yet. We're just beginning.'

Warehouses, railway-sidings, and such are only counters in the White
Man's Game, which can be swept up and re-dealt as the play varies. It
was the spirit in the thin dancing air--the new spirit of the new
city--which rejoiced me. Winnipeg has Things in abundance, but has
learned to put them beneath her feet, not on top of her mind, and so is
older than many cities. None the less the Things had to be shown--for
what shopping is to the woman showing off his town is to the
right-minded man. First came the suburbs--miles on miles of the dainty,
clean-outlined, wooden-built houses, where one can be so happy and so
warm, each unjealously divided from its neighbour by the lightest of
boundaries. One could date them by their architecture, year after year,
back to the Early 'Nineties, which is when civilisation began; could
guess within a few score dollars at their cost and the incomes of their
owners, and could ask questions about the new domestic appliances of
to-day.

'Asphalt streets and concrete sidewalks came up a few years ago,' said
our host as we trotted over miles of it. 'We found it the only way to
fight the prairie mud. Look!' Where the daring road ended, there lay
unsubdued, level with the pale asphalt, the tenacious prairie, over
which civilisation fought her hub-deep way to the West. And with asphalt
and concrete they fight the prairie back every building season. Next
came the show-houses, built by rich men with an eye to the honour and
glory of their city, which is the first obligation of wealth in a new
land.

We twisted and turned among broad, clean, tree-lined, sunlit boulevards
and avenues, all