apiece. They are cheap chiefly because the Labrador skin is not in fashion with women. Fashion in furs is constantly changing. Not many years ago a black fox skin often brought as much as fifteen hundred dollars. To-day, so many are coming from the fur farms that the price has fallen to one hundred and fifty dollars. Scarcity is one of the chief considerations in determining the value of furs, and fashion always counts more than utility. The rich, like the kings of old, demand something that the poor cannot have, and lose their interest in the genuine furs when their imitations have become common and cheap.

The dyer and his art have greatly changed the fur trade. It is he who enables the salesgirl to wear furs that look like those of her customers. For example, here is a coat made of the best beaver. Its price is four hundred dollars, and beside it is another made of dyed rabbit fur, marked one hundred and fifty dollars. It is hard for a novice to tell which is the better. All sorts of new names have been devised by the furriers to popularize dyed skins of humble animals, from house cats to skunks, in order to increase the supply of good-looking and durable furs. Reliable dealers will tell you just what their garments are made of, but the unscrupulous pass off the imitations as the genuine article.

The business of dyeing furs was developed first in Germany, when that country led the world in making dyes. Now that New York is competing with London as a great fur market many of the best German dyers are at work there. From the standpoint of the consumer, the chief objection to dyed fur is that the natural never fades, while the dyed one is almost certain to change its hue after a time.

Now let us go into the rooms where the furs are made up. It is like a tailor shop. Here is a designer, evolving new patterns out of big sheets of paper. There are the cutters, making trimmings, stoles, neck pieces, and coats. Each must be a colour expert, for a large part of the secret of fashioning a beautiful fur garment is in the skillful matching of the varying shades to give pleasing effects. Were the skins for a coat sewn together just as they come from the bale, the garment resulting would be a weirdlooking patchwork. Even before the skins are selected, they must be graded for the colours and shadings which go far to determine their value. There are no rules for this work; it takes a natural aptitude and long experience. In the London warehouse of the Hudson's Bay Company, the men of a single family have superintended the grading of all the millions of skins handled there for more than one hundred years.

Turn over this unfinished beaver coat lying on the bench and look at the wrong side. See how small are the pieces of which it is made and how irregular are their shapes. It is a mass of little patches, yet the outer, or right side, looks as though it were made of large skins, all of about the same size and shape. A coat of muskrat, transformed by dyeing into Hudson seal, may require seventy-five skins; a moleskin coat may contain six hundred. But in making up either garment each skin must be cut into a number of pieces and fitted to others in order to get the blending of light and dark shades which means beauty and quality.

The Eskimo woman and her children wear as every-day necessities furs which if made into more fashionable garments would bring large sums. Usually the whole family goes on the annual trip to the trading post.

As Saskatchewan was not made a province until 1904, Regina is one of the youngest capital cities in Canada. It was for many years the headquarters of the Mounted Police for all the Northwest.

W

CHAPTER XXIII

SASKATCHEWAN

E HAVE left Winnipeg and are now travelling across the great Canadian prairie, which stretches westward to the Rockies for a distance of eight hundred miles. This land, much of which in summer is in vast fields of golden grain, is now bare and brown, extending on and on in rolling treeless plains as far as our eyes can reach. Most of it is cut up into sections a mile square, divided by highway spaces one hundred feet wide. However, an automobile or wagon can go almost anywhere on the prairie, and everyone makes his own road.

Sixty miles west of Winnipeg we pass Portage la Prairie, near where John Sanderson, the man who filed the first homestead on the prairies, is still living. This part of the Dominion was then inhabited by Indians, and its only roads were the buffalo trails made by the great herds that roamed the country. To-day it is dotted with the comfortable homes of prosperous farmers, and the transcontinental railways have brought it within a few days' travel of the Atlantic and the Pacific seaboards.

A hundred and fifty miles farther west we cross the boundary into Saskatchewan, the greatest wheat province of the Dominion. It has an area larger than that of any European country except Russia, and is as large as France, Belgium, and Holland combined. From the United States