In the same way, and in spite of the apparent confusion about the pit where they take place, the records of the transactions are so exact that only about once in five thousand is such a record queried.
The Prince was immensely interested in all the practical details of working which make this handling of grain a living and dramatic thing, showing, as usual, that active curiosity for workaday facts that is essential to the make-up of the moderns.
His directness and accessibility made friends for him with these hard-headed business men as readily as it had made friends with soldiers and with the mass of people. Winnipeg had already exerted its Western faculty for affectionate epithets. He had already been dubbed a "Fine Kiddo," and it was commonplace to hear people say of him, "He's a regular feller, he'll do." They said these things again in the Exchange, declaring emphatically he was "sure, a manly-looking chap."
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.
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.
