can handle and that the diversion of a part of it to the American route will be a relief. To carry out this plan 1,000 miles of road are being built.

The prairie of the last frontier is being gridironed west and north and northwest by railroad lines that, as soon as the last spike is driven, will bring in people and take out wheat. It is the taking out of the wheat, the problem of the transportation of future harvests, that has given rise to numerous propositions of railway undertakings in another direction toward Hudson Bay. A seaboard on the great inland water that has hitherto been unused and useless is an attract

ive possibility, and the fact that it is altogether feasible explains why Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Premier of Canada, said in Parliament recently that the matter of a government-aided railroad to the Bay was under consideration, and intimated that some definite action soon was not unlikely. A company was incorporated at the last session of Parliament with power to build from Edmonton to Fort Churchill, on Hudson Bay, a distance of a thousand miles. The Canadian Northern is known to have similar ambitions and, in fact, has a section of road already under construction that looks like the beginning of a Hudson Bay branch. The Manitoba government, it has been reported, is entertaining plans to finance a road to the Bay from Winnipeg. Surveys have been made for a line from James Bay, the southern inlet of Hudson Bay, to Chicago, chiefly as a fish-carrying road. Out of these numerous projects, or out of others that will follow, there is pretty sure to materialize, and that soon, a railroad from some part of the settled West to some new port on the northern sea. It is in the talk-stage at present, but great railway systems. begin in talk.

But the path of the steel is reaching farther still Into the region until just now given quite over to the fur trapper and the Indians is going the transitman, and his going means something doing a few years hence. The Athabasca Railway Company is a new name that will in time be seen on north-bound freight cars. A charter has been given for 500 miles of road from Edmonton to Fort Smith, on the Slave River, and

the chances are that construction straight into the heart of the North-land will not be long delayed.

Yet farther North, in the upper lefthand corner of the continent, is the line of a railway that runs from Skagway, an Alaskan seaport, to Whitehorse, in Canada's Yukon country. The distance is 110 miles, over which trains have been running regularly since July, 1900, and for two-thirds of that distance the road was the most costly to build in America. The first fifteen miles rise to a height of nearly 3,000 feet, and the construction of a winding, twisting road-bed through the Skagway Valley, and along the side of sheer walls of mountain rock, represents engineering that cost millions. There were other problems to overcome. Up in the high places was a good-sized lake that must be crossed, but the railway-builder of the North is ingenious, and instead of bridging the lake, well nigh an impossibility, he cut a new outlet for it, drained it dry, and built his road over the clay bed.

This is the White Pass and Yukon Railway. It is a narrow-gauge, and is operated under the disadvantage of terrific storms in the winter months; but it paid the whole cost of construction in its first year, and three years ago earned $991,000, of which $440,000 was profit. Twelve thousand passengers a year are carried, and they pay twenty cents a mile, while freight rates are proportionately high. Its traffic is almost entirely that of miners going and coming between the camps and the outside.

The northernmost railway on the American continent is that running south. from Dawson, in the Yukon. It holds another record, too, as probably the most crooked road in America, winding in and out of the mountain gulches after the style of a rail fence, with a curvature approximating in places to twenty-eight degrees and a grade of three and fivetenths per cent. The Klondike Mines Railway has been in operation for only a year or two, but it has proved so acceptable a substitute for dog-trains and packhorses, reducing the freight rates from forty to one and one-half cents a pound, that an extension of its thirty-one miles is planned for the present season. Ultimately it will be extended into and

through the new mining country to the south, to connect either with the White Pass road at Whitehorse, giving a direct route to the Coast, or with the Grand Trunk Pacific branch going north from Edmonton, linking the Yukon directly with the western railway centres. One or the other of these plans will, it is almost certain, be carried into effect within the next few years.

Both the Klondike Mines and the White Pass railways are miners' roads, existing because of and for the sake of the numerous gold-mining camps of the Yukon country, but tourist travel is

they are American and associated with the Northern Pacific.

Another road to the Yukon has filed its plans with the Canadian railway commission, involving a straight-north route along the coast from Vancouver to Dawson. The surveys through British Columbia territory show immense cuttings and tunnels, with heavy bridging. It is altogether likely that when this road is built it will be by or for the Grand Trunk Pacific, in whose interest is thought to be a bill introduced this year at Washington authorizing the construction of a road from Skagway, in Alaska,

being encouraged, and in the summer months an increasing number of sightseers are doing the Far-North via the rail.

Diagonally across the North-West, cutting the great new land on the bias, will go a line now under project, whose ambitious purpose is to connect Dawson and Winnipeg. Survey parties have been quietly at work, and a goodly portion of the total 1,700 miles is said to be already routed. Such a line, traversing the northern prairies, the Peace River district, and the Yukon mining country, would hold an unique place among the railroads of the continent, and would involve, at its northern end, some tremendous engineering problems. The interests behind this project have been kept somewhat secret, but it is believed that

to a point at or near to Prince Rupert, the Grand Trunk Pacific terminus.

For a year past survey work has been under way on two roads from the southwestern coast of Alaska to the copper district of the interior. One was being financed by London capitalists, representing the same interests as those behind the White Pass and Yukon Railway, and the other by the Guggenheims and J. P. Morgan. The two routes were such as would closely parallel each other and while entailing immense double expense would open up practically the same country. The promoters have therefore consolidated, under Guggenheim control, and one road is now to be built, instead of two, It will probably run from Catella, a seaport with good terminal facilities, into the heart of the

White River copper country- and, possibly, into the Canadian Yukon. About 400 miles of the road will be built this year, and the same man who built the White Pass and Yukon road is engineering it.

One more railway enterprise comes from the top corner of the continent, and it exceeds them all in spectacular bigness and daring. It goes by the name of the Trans-Alaska-Siberia Railway, a phrasing that at once explains its route and indicates the immensity of its undertaking. In the first week of the present year a survey party, with dog-teams drawing their supplies, left Dawson for White River, and a fortnight later began the initial work of mapping out a railway route. The general route to be fol

lowed is along the White River and down the Tanana Valley, picking up the incidental traffic of the existing mining camps and heading toward Bering Strait. The plan of the men behind this project is to establish a route from Alaska to Siberia, across the Strait, and to build an extension connecting with the great Russian system. If the project ever gets so far, the American, Canadian, and Russian governments will be called upon to lend a hand. It is a bold scheme, but whether the Siberian end of it is ever carried out or not it is practically certain that some portion of the Alaskan section will be built shortly, opening up a mining region of unknown riches and another great section to settler and trader.

MPORTATIONS of cage birds into the United States have increased by more than twenty-five per cent during the last four years. Of course a great majority of such feathered creatures brought into this country are canaries, the breeding of which in Germany, and more particularly by peasants in the Harz Mountains, is a most picturesque industry, but about

three hundred other species are fetched hither from various parts of the world, and the methods adopted for capturing and transporting them are in many instances both curious and interesting.

In earlier days it was the custom, much more commonly than now, for sailors to collect strange birds in distant quarters of the globe and bring them to American or European seaports, where they disposed of them for small sums in ready

money. Even at the present time the species imported from the Orient are mostly introduced in this way, the traffic being conducted on a considerable scale by the crews of Pacific steamships with dealers in San Francisco. But, so far as other birds are concerned, the business is more highly systematized. Merchants in this line of trade employ agents to secure supplies of birds in their native haunts, while maintaining such relations with correspondents at European centers as enable them to draw upon those sources for whatever additional feathered stock may be required.

Take the case of parrots, for example. These birds are always obtained from the nest, and at the proper season the large American dealers send men to Mexico and South

America for collecting purposes. Headquarters are established by these agents at some point convenient to the parrot country, and natives familiar with the habits of the little talkers are employed to hunt for them, to take the young from the nests when of proper age, and to deliver them at a stated price per hundred -whereupon they are sent off in periodical shipments to the United States.

In the State of Tamaulipas, in Mexico, parrots of the muchprized "double yellowhead" variety-famous as conversationalistsare found in countless flocks; indeed, the woods are literally full of them, and are vocal with their harsh cry from sunrise to sunset. They seem to have but one note; it is only in confinement that they are imitative. In this country they are worth ten dollars apiece.

Parrots build their nests in holes and hollows of trees, and in parts of Mexico they are so numerous that every available cavity is occupied by them in the nesting season. Nevertheless, the work of procuring their young is extremely arduous, even for the expert native. Trees in the tropics are commonly festooned with climbing vines of thick

parts of the world by dealers in Hamburg, London, Liverpool, and other large European cities. Similar expeditions are dispatched from New York and Philadelphia to Cuba and Mexico and occasionally to more distant lands-even India; but the principal American houses maintain connections with establishments in Germany, through which their supplies of Old World and South American

nesses varying from a thread to the size of a ship's cable, and all this network of vegetation is usually infested by myriads of desperately fierce ants of large size, which both bite and sting. Many an unfortunate peon, it is said, has lost his life while engaged in this pursuit, because, tortured beyond endurance by the ferocious insects, he was unable to retain his grip.

Small birds most commonly are taken with nets, and for this purpose men specially skilled in the art are sent to remote

birds are more often and more easily obtained.

Now, when the birds have been captured, the problem of shipping them to the point of destination is often one of much difficulty. In order that there may be profit in the enterprise, they must be delivered alive and in good health. Parrots suffer frightfully from seasickness, often dying of it-which is one reason why they are so expensive. Most of the small birds received from Africa are forwarded in large boxes especially pre