The Foreigner | Page 2

and one articles of commerce that piled the store
shelves from cellar to roof.

Fifty years ago, about the lonely post a little settlement had gathered--a
band of sturdy Scots. Those dour and doughty pioneers of peoples had
planted on the Red River their homes upon their little "strip" farms--a
rampart of civilization against the wide, wild prairie, the home of the
buffalo, and camp ground of the hunters of the plain.
Twenty-five years ago, in the early eighties, a little city had fairly dug
its roots into the black soil, refusing to be swept away by that cyclone
of financial frenzy known over the Continent as the "boom of '81," and
holding on with abundant courage and invincible hope, had gathered to
itself what of strength it could, until by 1884 it had come to assume an
appearance of enduring solidity. Hitherto accessible from the world by
the river and the railroad from the south, in this year the city began to
cast eager eyes eastward, and to listen for the rumble of the first
trans-continental train, which was to bind the Provinces of Canada into
a Dominion, and make Winnipeg into one of the cities of the world.
Trade by the river died, but meantime the railway from the south kept
pouring in a steady stream of immigration, which distributed itself
according to its character and in obedience to the laws of affinity, the
French Canadian finding a congenial home across the Red River in old
St. Boniface, while his English-speaking fellow-citizen, careless of the
limits of nationality, ranged whither his fancy called him. With these, at
first in small and then in larger groups, from Central and South Eastern
Europe, came people strange in costume and in speech; and holding
close by one another as if in terror of the perils and the loneliness of the
unknown land, they segregated into colonies tight knit by ties of blood
and common tongue.
Already, close to the railway tracks and in the more unfashionable
northern section of the little city, a huddling cluster of little black
shacks gave such a colony shelter. With a sprinkling of Germans,
Italians and Swiss, it was almost solidly Slav. Slavs of all varieties
from all provinces and speaking all dialects were there to be found:
Slavs from Little Russia and from Great Russia, the alert Polak, the
heavy Croatian, the haughty Magyar, and occasionally the stalwart
Dalmatian from the Adriatic, in speech mostly Ruthenian, in religion
orthodox Greek Catholic or Uniat and Roman Catholic. By their
non-discriminating Anglo-Saxon fellow-citizens they are called
Galicians, or by the unlearned, with an echo of Paul's Epistle in their

minds, "Galatians." There they pack together in their little shacks of
boards and tar-paper, with pent roofs of old tobacco tins or of slabs or
of that same useful but unsightly tar-paper, crowding each other in
close irregular groups as if the whole wide prairie were not there
inviting them. From the number of their huts they seem a colony of no
great size, but the census taker, counting ten or twenty to a hut, is
surprised to find them run up into hundreds. During the summer
months they are found far away in the colonies of their kinsfolk, here
and there planted upon the prairie, or out in gangs where new lines of
railway are in construction, the joy of the contractor's heart, glad to
exchange their steady, uncomplaining toil for the uncertain, spasmodic
labour of their English-speaking rivals. But winter finds them once
more crowding back into the little black shacks in the foreign quarter of
the city, drawn thither by their traditionary social instincts, or driven by
economic necessities. All they ask is bed space on the floor or, for a
higher price, on the home-made bunks that line the walls, and a woman
to cook the food they bring to her; or, failing such a happy arrangement,
a stove on which they may boil their varied stews of beans or barley,
beets or rice or cabbage, with such scraps of pork or beef from the neck
or flank as they can beg or buy at low price from the slaughter houses,
but ever with the inevitable seasoning of garlic, lacking which no
Galician dish is palatable. Fortunate indeed is the owner of a shack,
who, devoid of hygienic scruples and disdainful of city sanitary laws,
reaps a rich harvest from his fellow-countrymen, who herd together
under his pent roof. Here and there a house surrendered by its former
Anglo-Saxon owner to the "Polak" invasion, falls into the hands of an
enterprising foreigner, and becomes to the happy possessor a veritable
gold mine.
Such a house had come into the possession of Paulina Koval. Three
years ago, with two children she had come to the city, and