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the wall, for convenience in sweeping the floors.

There is no wood to shrink or rot, no shelter for vermin or insects, no corners for dirt, all corners being rounded. There is no insurance to pay, no painting required and little or no expense for repairs.

The building is so constructed that the waste heat from the cooking-range is utilized in winter for warming the house. There is no handling of coal or ashes. The coal is hoisted by a simple chain block and dumped through a coal hole on the roof into a large pocket. It is then fed automatically by gravity to the stove which combines, in one concrete fixture, the range, house heater, gas stove and hot water heater. The ashes drop from the fire box into cans which are removed from the outside.

The ice box is arranged for use as a fresh air closet, using no ice in cold weather and designed also to flush out with hose. The garbage system, too, is unique, a cast iron chamber being provided in the

smoke flue, where the waste is dried, then dumped by the use of a damper into the fire box, its fuel value being saved.

The windows are unit size cast iron, of casement type, with transoms over them to regulate ventilation easily. The walls are hollow to prevent dampness, and there are air circulation openings under the roof slab. Fire places are provided in all the rooms and the flues connect around the smoke pipe for natural ventilation.

In this concrete building, construction standard unit collapsible steel forms are used, which are designed to allow change of arrangement and variety in plants, and the entire house is cast, with walls, floor and partitions, of reinforced concrete. The molds may also be used for any number of duplications of the original building that may be desired.

In the Rosemont railway station, shown at the head of the article, an interesting treatment has been made by the inlay of small marble blocks.

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A PRETTY-AND SANITARY-CONCRETE RESIDENCE OF FIREPROOF

CONSTRUCTION.

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into the very blood for generations the careful nurture of all game. At one place we heard of a huge black bear that had been molesting some new ranches. "No take now," said the Indian. "Him fur no good now." Though we might camp on bare rocks and the fire lay dead ash, it was the extra Indian paddler who invariably went back to spatter it out. You know the white's innate love for a roaring log fire in front of the camp at night? The Indian calls. that "a-no-good-whiteman-fire-scareaway-game."

Now take another look at the map. Where the Saskatchewan takes a great bend 300 miles northeast of Prince Albert, it is no longer a river-it is a vast muskeg of countless still amber water channels not twice the width of your canoe and quaking silt islands of sand and goose grass-ideal hidden and almost impenetrable for small game. Always muskeg marks the limit of big game and the beginning of the ground of the little fellows-waupoos the rabbit and musquash the muskrat and sakwasew the mink and nukik the otter and wuchak or pekan the fisher. It is a safe wager that the profits on the millions upon millions of little pelts-hundreds of thousands of muskrat are taken out of this muskeg alone-exceed by a hundred fold the profits on the larger furs of beaver and silver fox and bear and wolf and cross fox and marten.

Look at the map again. North of Cumberland lake to the next fur post is

a trifling run of 250 to 300 miles by dog train to Lac du Brochet or Reindeer Lake-more muskeg cut by limestone. and granite ridges. Here you can measure 400 miles east or west and not get out of the muskeg till you reach Athabasca on the West and Hudson's Bay on the East. North of Lac du Brochet is a straight stretch of 1,000 milesnothing but rocks and cataracts and stunted woods, "little sticks" the Indians call them and sky colored waters in links and chains and lakes with the quaking muskeg goose grass and muskrat reed, cut and chiselled and trenched by the amber water ways.

If you think there is any danger of settlement ever encroaching on the muskegs and barrens, come with me on a trip of some weeks to the south end of this field.

We had been pulling against slack water all day, water so slack you could dip your hand down and fail to tell which way the current ran. Where the high banks dropped suddenly to such a dank tangle of reeds, brush wood, windfall and timbers drifted 1,500 miles down from the forests of the Rocky Mountains -such a tangle as I have never seen in any swamp of the South-the skeleton of a moose, come to its death by a jump among the wind fall, marked the eastern limit of big game; and presently the river was lost-not in a lake-but in a swamp. A red fox came scurrying through the goose grass, sniffed the air, looked at us and ran along abreast of our canoe for about a mile, evidently scent

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FEEDING THE FAITHFUL PACK DOGS-'A SCENE ON ATHABASCA LAKE.

ing the bacon of the tin "grub box." Muskrats feed on the bulb of the tufted "reed like a tree," 16 feet high on each side; and again and again little kits came out and swam in the ripple of our canoe. Once an old duck performed the acrobatic feat over which the nature and anti-nature writers have been giving each other the lie. We had come out of one long amber channel to be confronted by three openings exactly alike, not much wider than the length of our Klondike canoe, all lined by the high tufted reed. MacKenzie, the half-breed rapids man, had been telling us the endless Cree legends of Wa-sa-kee-chaulk, the Cree Hiawatha, and his Indian lore of stagnant waters now lured him into steering us to one of the side channels. We were not expected. An old mother duck was directly across our path teaching some twenty-two little black bobbling downy babies how to swim. With a cry that shrieked "leg it-leg it" plain as a quack could speak and which sent the little fellows scuttling, half swim, half run, the old mother flung herself over on her back not a paddle's length ahead of us, dipped, dived, came up again just at our

bow and flopped broken-winged over the water ahead of us near enough almost to be caught by hand; but when you stretched out your hand, the crafty lady dipped and dived and came up broken-winged again.

"You old fool," said Sexsmith, our head man, "your wing is no more broken than mine is. We're not going to hurt your babies. Shut up there and stop that lying."

Spite of which the old duck kept up her pantomime of deceit for more than a mile; when she suddenly sailed up over our heads back to her hidden babies, a very Boadicea of an old duck girl. When we drew in for nooning, wild geese honked over our heads near enough to be hit by the butt of a gun. Drift chips, lodged in the goose grass, kindled fire for kettle; but oilcloth had to be spread before you could get footing ashore. I began to wonder what happened as to repairs when canoes ripped over a snag in this kind of region; and that brought up the story of a fur trader's wife in another muskeg region north of Lac La Ronge up towards Churchill River, who was in a canoe

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