While full-blooded Indians still move in its streets, it is putting up
buildings worthy of a European metropolis.  It has opened big
up-to-date stores and public offices by the side of streets that are
yet the mere stamped earth of the untutored plain.

Along its main boulevard, Jasper Avenue, slip the astonishing excess of
automobiles one has learnt to expect in Canadian towns.  A brisk
electric tram service weaves the mass of street movement together, and
at night over all shines an exuberance of electric light.

That main street is tingling with modernity.  Its stores, its
music-halls, its "movie" theatres, and its hotels glitter with the
nervous intensity of a spirit avid of the latest ideas.

Fringing the canyon of the brown North Saskatchewan River is a
beautiful automobile road, winding among pretty residential plots and
comely enough for any town.

Yet swing out in a motor for a few miles, and one is in a land where
the roads--if any--are but the merest trails, where the silent and
brooding prairie (hereabouts blessed with trees) stretches emptily for
miles by the thousand.

Turn the car north, and it heads for "The Great Lone Land," that
expands about the reticent stretches of the Great Slave country, or
follows the Peace River and the Athabasca beyond the cold line of the
Arctic Circle.

To get to these rich and isolated lands--and one thinks this out in the
lounge of an hotel worthy of the Strand--the traveller must take
devious and disconnected ways.  Railways tap great tracts of the
country, going up to Fort McMurray and the Peace River, and these
connect up with river and lake steamers that ply at intervals.  But
travel here is yet mainly in the speculative stage, and long waits and
guides and canoes and a camping outfit are necessary.

In winter, if the traveller is adventurous and tough, he can progress
more swiftly.  He can go up by automobile and run along the courses of
the rivers on the thick ice, and, on the ice, cross the big lakes.

Though the land is within the Arctic Circle, it is rich.  I talked with
a traveller who had just returned from this area, and he spoke of the
superb tall crops of grain he had seen on his journey.  It will be
magnificent land when it is opened up, and can accommodate the
population of a kingdom.  The growing season, of course, is shorter,
but this is somewhat balanced by the longer northern days and the
intense sunlight that is proper to them.  The drawbacks are the very
long winters, loneliness and the difficulties of transport.

Edmonton, sitting across the gorge of the Saskatchewan, feeds these
districts and reflects them.  Because of this it is a city of
anachronisms.  High up on the cliff, its site chosen with the usual
appositness of Canada, is the Capitol building, a bright and soaring
structure done in the latest manner.  Right under that decisively
modern pile is a group of rough wooden houses.  They are the original
stores of the Hudson Bay Company, standing exactly as they did when
they formed an outpost point of civilization in the Northwest.

It is obviously a town in a young land, pushing ahead, as the Prince
indicated in his speech to the Provincial Government, with all the
intensity and zest of youth, having all the sense of freedom and
possibility that the rich and great farming, furbearing and
timber-growing tracts give it.

IV

The keen spirit of the city was reflected in the welcome it gave the
Prince.  It was a wet, grey day, but the whole town was out to line the
streets and to gather at the ceremonial points.  And it was a musical
greeting.  Edmonton is prone to melody.  Brass bands appear to flourish
here.  There was one at every street corner.  And not only did they
play as the Prince in the midst of his red-tuniced "Mountie" escort
passed by, but they played all day, so that the city was given over to
a non-stop carnival of popular airs.

At the Parliament Buildings the crowds were as dense as ever.  They
showed the same spirit in listening to addresses and reply, and the
same hustling sense of "getting there" when entering the building to
take part in the public reception.  The addresses of welcome were a
novelty.  Engrossed on vellum, it had been sewn on the purple silk
lining of a yellow-furred coyote skin, a local touch that interested
the Prince.  There was another such touch after the reception.  A body
of Stony Indians were presented to His Royal Highness.  These Indians
had travelled from a distance in the hope of seeing the son of the
Great White Chief, and they not only saw him but were presented to him.
He talked with particular sympathy to one chief whose son had been a
comrade-in-arms in the Canadian ranks during the war and who had been
killed in the fighting.

The opening of a war memorial hall, a big and dazzling dance at the
Government House, and other functions, fulfilled the usual round.  And,
last but not least, the Prince became a player and a "fan" in a ball
game.

There was a match (I hope "match" is right) between the local team, and
one of its passionate rivals, and the Prince went to the ground to take
part.  Walking to the "diamond" (I'm sure that is right), he equipped
himself in authentic manner, with floppy, jockey-peaked cap and a
ruthless glance, took his stance as a "pitcher" and delivered two
balls.  I don't know whether they were stingers or swizzers, or
whatever the syncopated phraseology of the great game dubs them, but
they were matters of great admiration.

Having led to the undoing (I hope, for that was his task) of some one,
the Prince then joined the audience.  He chose not the best seats, but
the popular ones, for he sat on the grass among the "bleachers," and
when one has sat out of the shade in the hot prairie sun one knows what
"bleachers" means.

This sporting little interlude was immensely popular, and the Prince
left Edmonton with the reputation of being a true "fan" and "a real
good feller."

CHAPTER XV

CALGARY AND THE CATTLE RANCH

The Royal train arrived in Calgary, Alberta, on the morning of Sunday,
September 14th, after some of the members of the train had spent an
hour or so shooting gophers, a small field rat, part squirrel, and at
all times a great pest in grain country.

Calgary was a town that charmed at once.  It stands in brilliant
sunlight--and that sunlight seems to have an eternal quality--in a nest
of enfolding hills.  Two rivers with the humorous names of Bow and
Elbow run through it; they are blue with the astonishing blueness of
glacial silt.

From the hills, or from the tops of such tall buildings as the
beautiful Palliser Hotel, the high and austere dividing line of the
Rockies can be seen across the rolling country.  Snow-cowled, and
almost impalpable above the ground mist, the great range of mountains
looks like the curtain wall of a stronghold of mystics.

In the streets the city itself has an air of radiance.  There is an
invigoration in the atmosphere that seems to give all things a peculiar
quality of zest.  The sidewalks have a bustling and crisp virility, the
public buildings are handsome, and the streets of homes particularly
gracious.

The Sunday reception of the Prince was eloquent but quiet.  There were
the usual big crowds, but the day was deliberately without ceremonial.
Divine Service at the Pro-Cathedral, where the Prince unveiled a
handsome rood-screen to the memory of those fallen in the war, was the
only item in a restful day, which was spent almost entirely in the
country at the County Club.

But perhaps the visit to the County Club was not altogether quiet.

The drive out to this charming place in a pit of a valley, where one of
the rivers winds through the rolling hills, began in the comely
residential streets.

These residential districts of Canada and America certainly impress
one.  The well-proportioned and pretty houses, with their deep
verandahs, the trees that group about them, the sparkling grass that
comes down to the edge of the curb--all give one the sense of being the
work of craftsmen who are masters in design.  That sense seems to me to
be evident, not only in domestic architecture, but in the design of
public buildings.  The feeling I had was that the people on this
Continent certainly know how to build.  And by building, I do not mean
merely erecting a house of distinction, but also choosing sites of
distinction.

Nearly all the newer public buildings are of excellent design, and all
are placed in excellent positions.  Some of these sites are actually
brilliant; the Parliament Houses at Ottawa, as seen from the river, are
intensely apposite, so are those at Edmonton and Regina, while the
sites of such buildings as the Banff Springs Hotel, and, in a lesser
sense, the Château at Lake Louise, seem to me to have been chosen with
real genius.

In saying that the people on this Continent certainly know how to
build, I am speaking of both the United States and Canada.  This fine
sense of architecture is even more apparent in the United States (I, of
course, only speak of the few towns I visited) than in Canada, for
there are more buildings and it is a richer country.  The sense of
architecture may spring from that country, or it may be that the whole
Continent has the instinct.  As I am not competent to judge, I accuse
the whole of the Western hemisphere of that virtue.

The Prince passed through these pretty districts where are the
beautiful houses of ranchers and packing kings, farmers and pig rearers
whose energy and vision have made Calgary rich as well as good to look
upon.  Passing from this region of good houses and good roads, he came
upon a highway that is prairie even less than unalloyed, for constant
traffic has scored it with a myriad ruts and bumps.

Half-way up a hill, where a bridge of wood jumps across the stream that
winds amid the pleasant gardens of the houses, the Prince's car was
held up.  A mob of militants rushed down upon it, and neither
chauffeur, nor Chief of Staff, nor suite could resist.

It was an attack not by Bolshevists, but by Boy Scouts.  They flung
themselves across the road in a mass, and would take no nonsense from
any one.  They insisted that the engine should take a holiday, and that
they should hitch themselves to the car.  They won their point and
hitched.  The car, under some hundred boy-power, went up the long
hill--and a gruelling hill it is--through the club gates, and down a
longer hill, to where, in a deep cup, the house stands.

At the club the visit was entirely formal.  The Prince became an
ordinary member and chatted to other men and women members in a
thoroughly club-like manner.

"He is so easy to get on with," said one lady.  "I found it was I who
was the more reserved for the first few minutes, and it was I who had
to become more human.

"He is a young man who has something to say, and who has ears to listen
to things worth while.  He has no use for preliminaries or any other
nonsense that wastes time in 'getting together.'"

He lunched at the club and drifted about among the people gathered on
the lawns before going for a hard walk over the hills.

II

The real day of functions was on Monday, when the Prince drove through
the streets, visiting many places, and, later, speaking impressively at
a citizens' lunch in the Palliser Hotel.

His passage through the streets was cheered by big crowds, but crowds
of a definite Western quality.  Here the crowns of hats climbed high,
sometimes reaching monstrous peaks that rise as samples of the Rockies
from curly brims as monstrous.  Under these still white felt altitudes
are the vague eyes and lean, contemplative faces of the cattlemen from
the stock country around.  Here and there were other prairie types who
linger while the tide of modernity rushes past them.  They are the
Indians, brown, lined and forward stooping, whose reticent eyes looking
out from between their braided hair seem to be dwelling on their long
yesterday.

At the citizens' lunch the Prince departed from his usual trend of
speech-making to voice some of the impressions that this new land had
brought to him.  He once more spoke of the sense of spaciousness and
possibility the vast prairies of the West had given him, but today he
went further and dwelt upon the need of making those possibilities
assured.  The foundation that had made the future as well as the
present possible, was the work of the great pioneers and railway men
who had mastered the country in their stupendous labours, and made it
fit for a great race to grow in.

The foundation built in so much travail was ready.  Upon it Canada must
build, and it must build right.

"The farther I travel through Canada," he said, "the more I am struck
by the great diversities which it presents; its many and varied
communities are not only separated by great distances, but also by
divergent interests.  You have much splendid alien human material to
assimilate, and so much has already been done towards cementing all
parts of the Dominion that I am sure you will ultimately succeed in
accomplishing this great task, but it will need the co-operation of all
parties, of all classes and all races, working together for the common
cause of Canadian nationhood under the British flag.

"Serious difficulties and controversies must often arise, but I know
nothing can set Canada back except the failure of the different classes
and communities to look to the wider interests of the Dominion, as well
as their own immediate needs.  I realize that scattered communities,
necessarily preoccupied with the absorbing task of making good, often
find the wider view difficult to keep.  Yet I feel sure that it will be
kept steadily before the eyes of all the people of this great Western
country, whose very success in making the country what it is proves
their staying power and capacity."

Canada, he declared, had already won for herself a legitimate place in
the fraternity of nations, and the character and resources within her
Dominion must eventually place her influence equal to, if not greater
than, the influence of any other part of the Empire.  Much depended
upon Canada's use of her power, and the greatness of her future was
wrapped up in her using it wisely and well.

The great gathering was impressed by the statesman-like quality of the
speech, the first of its kind he had made since his landing.  He spoke
with ease, making very little use of his notes and showing a greater
freedom from nervousness.  The sincerity of his manner carried
conviction, and there was a great demonstration when he sat down.

In the afternoon he left Calgary by train for the small "cow town" of
High River, from there going on by car over roads that were at times
cart ruts in the fields, to the Bar U Ranch, where he was to be the
guest of Mr. George Lane.

His host, "George Lane," as he is called everywhere, is known as far as
the States and England as one of the cattle kings.  He is a Westerner
of the Westerners, and an individuality even among them.  Tall and
loose-built, with an authentic Bret Harte quality in action and speech,
he can flash a glance of shrewdness or humour from the deep eyes under
their shaggy, pent-house brows.  He is one of the biggest ranch owners
in the West (perhaps the biggest); his judgment on cattle or horses is
law, and he has no frills.

His attractive ranch on the plains, where the rolling lands meet the
foot-hills of the Rockies, has an air of splendid spaciousness.  We did
not go to Bar U, but a friend took us out on a switchback automobile
run over what our driver called a "hellofer" road, to just such another
ranch near Cockrane, and we could judge what these estates were like.

They are lonely but magnificent.  They extend with lakes, close, tight
patches of bush and small and occasional woods over undulating country
to the sharp, bare wall of the snow-capped Rockies.  The light is
marvellous.  Calgary is 3,500 feet up, and the level mounts steadily to
the mountains.  At this altitude the sunlight has an astonishing
clarity, and everything is seen in a sharp and brilliant light.

In the rambling but comfortable house of the ranch the Prince was
entertained with cattleman's fare, and on the Tuesday (after a ten-mile
run before breakfast) he was introduced to the ardours of the
cattleman's calling.  He mounted a broncho and with his host joined the
cowboys in rounding several thousand head of cattle, driving them in
towards the branding corrals.

This is no task for an idler or a slacker.  The bunch was made up
mainly of cows with calves, or steers of less than a year old, who
believed in the policy of self-determination, being still unbranded and
still conspicuously independent.  Most of them, in fact, had seen
little or nothing of man in their life of lonely pasturage over the
wide plains.

Riding continually at a gallop and in a whirlwind of movement and dust
and horns, the Prince helped to bunch the mass into a compact circle,
and then joined with the others in riding into the nervous herd, in
order to separate the calves from the mothers, and the unbranded steers
from those already marked with the sign of Bar U.

Calves and steers were roped and dragged to the corral, where they were
flung and the brand seared on their flanks with long irons taken from a
fire in the enclosure.

The Prince did not spare himself, and worked as hard as any cattleman
in the business, and indeed he satisfied those exacting critics, the
cowboys, who produced in his favour another Westernism, describing him
as "a Bear.  He's fur all over."  Then, as though a strenuous morning
in the saddle was not enough, he went off in the afternoon after
partridges, spending the whole time on the tramp until he was due to
start for Calgary.

His pleasure in his experience was summed up in the terse comment:
"Some Ranch," that he set against his signature in Mr. Lane's visitors'
book.  It also had the practical result of turning him into a rancher
himself, for it was at this time he saw the ranch which he ultimately
bought.  It is a very good little property, close to Mr. Lane's, so
that in running it the Prince will have the advantage of that expert's
advice.  Part of the Prince's plan for handling it is to give an
opportunity to soldiers who served with him in the war to take up
positions on the ranch.  Mr. Lane told me himself that the proposition
is a practical one, and there should be profitable results.

Leaving Bar U, the Prince returned to High River at that Canadian pace
of travelling which sets the timid European wondering whether his
accident policy is fully paid up.  In High River, where the old
cow-puncher ideal of hitting up the dust in the wild and woolly manner
has given way to the rule of jazz dances and bright frocks, he mounted
the train and steamed off to Calgary.

In Calgary great things had been done to the Armoury where the ball was
to be held.  Handled in the big manner of the Dominion, the great hall
had been re-floored with "hard wood" blocks, and a scheme of real
beauty, extending to an artificial sky in the roof, had been evolved.

At this dance the whole of Calgary seemed in attendance, either on the
floor, or outside watching the guests arrive.  In Canada the scope of
the invitations is universal.  There are no distinctions.  The pretty
girl who serves you with shaving soap over the drug store counter asks
if she will meet you at the Prince's ball, as a matter of course.  She
is going.  So is the young man at the estate office.  So is your taxi
chauffeur (the taxi is an open touring car).  So is--everybody.  These
dances are the most democratic affairs, and the most spirited.  And as
spirited and democratic as anybody was the Prince himself, who, in this
case, in spite of his run before breakfast, a hard morning in the
saddle, his long tramp in the afternoon, his automobile and railway
travelling, danced with the rest into the small hours of the morning.

All the little boys in Calgary watched for his arrival.  And after he
had gone in there was a fierce argument as to who had come in closest
contact with him.  One little boy said that the Prince had looked
straight at him and smiled.

Another capped it:

"He shoved me on the shoulder as he went by," he cried.

The inevitable last chimed in:

"You don't make it at all," he said.  "He trod on my brother's toe."

CHAPTER XVI

CHIEF MORNING STAR COMES TO BANFF AND THE ROCKIES

In the night the Royal train steamed the few miles from Calgary and on
the morning of Wednesday, September 17th, we woke up in the first field
works of the Rocky Mountains.

It was a day on which we were to see one of the most picturesque
ceremonies of the tour, and slipping through the high scarps of the
mountains to the little valley in which Banff station stands, we were
into that experience of colour at once.

Drawn up in the open by the little station was a line of Indians, clad
in their historic costumes, and mounted on the small, springy horses of
Canada.  Some were in feathers and buckskin and beads, some in the high
felt hats and bright-shirts of the cowboy, all were romantic in
bearing.  They were there to form the escort of the new "Chief."

As the Prince's car drove from the station along a road that wound its
way amid glades of spruce and poplar glowing with the old gold of
Autumn that filled the valleys winding about the feet of high and
austere mountains, other bodies of Stoney Indians joined the escort
about the car.

They had gathered at the opening of every side lane, and as the
cavalcade passed, dropped in behind, until the procession became a
snake of shifting colour, vermilion and cherry, yellow and blue and
green, going forward under the dappling of sun that slipped between the
swinging branches.

Chiefs, the sunray of eagles' feathers on their heads, braves in full
war-paint, Indian cowboys in shirts of all the colours of the spectrum,
and squaws a mass of beads and sequins, with bright shawls and brighter
silk head-wraps, made up the escort.  Behind and at times in front of
many of the squaws were papooses, some riding astraddle, their arms
round the women's waists, others slung in shawls, but all clad in
Indian garb that seemed to be made up of a mass of closely-sewn beads,
turquoise, green, white or red, so that the little bodies were like
scaly and glittering lizards.

This ride that wound in and out of these very beautiful mountain
valleys took the Prince past the enclosures of the National Park, and
he saw under the trees the big, hairy-necked bison, the elk and
mountain goats that are harboured in this great natural reserve.

On the racecourse were Indian tepees, banded, painted with the heads of
bulls, and bright with flags.  The braves who were waiting for the
Prince, and those who were escorting him, danced, their ponies whirling
about, racing through veils of dust and fluttering feathers and
kerchiefs in a sort of ride of welcome.  From over by the tepees there
came the low throbbing of tom-toms to join with the thin, high,
dog-like whoop of the Indian greeting.

On a platform at the hub of half-circle of Indians the Prince listened
to the addresses and accepted the Chieftaincy of the Stoney tribe.
Some of the Indians had their faces painted a livid chrome-yellow, so
that their heads looked like masks of death; some were smeared with
red, some barred with blue.  Most, however, showed merely the
high-boned, sphinx-like brown of their faces free from war-paint.  The
costumes of many were extremely beautiful, the wonderful beadwork on
tunic and moccasins being a thing of amazing craftsmanship, though the
elk-tooth decorations, though of great value, were not so attractive.

Standing in front of the rest, the chief, "Little Thunder," read the
address to the Prince.  He was a big, aquiline fellow, young and
handsome, clad in white, hairy chaps and cowboy shirt.  He spoke in
sing-song Cree, his body curving back from straddled knees as though he
sat a pulling horse.

In his historic tongue, and then in English, he spoke of the honour the
Prince was paying the Stoneys, and of their enduring loyalty to him and
his father; and he asked the Prince "to accept from us this Indian
suit, the best we have, emblematic of the clothes we wore in happy
days.  We beg you also to allow us to elect you as our chief, and to
give you the name Chief Morning Star."

The suit given to the Prince was an exceedingly handsome one of white
buckskin, decorated with beads, feathers and fur, and surmounted by a
great headdress of feathers rising from a fillet of beads and fur.  The
Prince put on the headdress at once, and spoke to the Indians as a
chief to his braves, telling them of the honour they had done him.

When he had finished, the tom-toms were brought into action again, and
a high, thin wail went up from the ring of Indians, and they began
almost at once to move round in a dance.  Indian dancing is monotonous.
It is done to the high, nasal chanting of men gathered round a big drum
in the centre of the ring.  This drum is beaten stoically by all to
give the time.

Some of the dancing is the mere bending of knees and a soft shuffling
stamping of moccasined feet.  In other dances vividly clad,
broad-faced, comely squaws joined in the ring of braves, whose feathers
and elk-tooth ornaments swung as they moved, and the whole ring, with a
slightly rocking movement, shuffled an inch at a time round the tom-tom
men.  The motion was very like that of soldiers dressing ranks.

A more spirited dance is done by braves holding weapons stiffly, and
following each other in file round the circle, now bending knees, or
bodies, now standing upright.  As they pass round and dip they loose
little snapping yelps.  All the time their faces remain as impassive as
things graven.

The dancing was followed by racing.  Boys mounted bareback the springy
little horses, and with their legs twisted into rope-girths--with
reins, the only harness--went round the track at express speed.  Young
women, riding astride, their dresses tied about their knees, also
raced, showing horsemanship even superior to the boys.  The riding was
extremely fine, and the little horses bunch and move with an elastic
and hurtling movement that is thrilling.

The ceremony had made the bravest of spectacles.  The Indian colour and
romance of the scene, set in a deep cup rimmed by steep, grim
mountains, the sides and icecaps of which the bright sunlight threw up
into an almost unreal actuality, gave it a rare and entrancing quality.
And not the least of its picturesque attractions were the papooses in
bead and fringed leather, who grubbed about in the earth with stoic
calm.  They looked almost too toylike to be true.  They looked as
though their right place was in a scheme of decoration on a wall or a
mantel-shelf.  As one lady said of them: "They're just the sort of
things I want to take home as souvenirs."

II

Banff is an exquisite and ideal holiday place, and I can appreciate the
impulse that sends many Americans as well as Canadians to enjoy its
beauties in the summer.

It is a valley ringed by an amphitheatre of mountains, up the harsh
slopes of which spruce forests climb desperately until beaten by the
height and rock on the scarps beneath crests which are often
snow-capped.  Through this broad valley, and winding round slopes into
other valleys, run streams of that poignant blueness which only glacial
silt and superb mountain skies can Impart.

The houses and hotels in this Switzerland of Canada are charming, but
the Banff Springs Hotel, where the Prince stayed, is genius.  It is
perched up on a spur in the valley, so that in that immense ring of
heights it seems to float insubstantially above the clouds of trees,
like the palace of some genii.  For not only was its site admirably
chosen, but the whole scheme of the building fits the atmosphere of the
place.  And it is as comfortable as it is beautiful.

It faces across its red-tiled, white-balustered terraces and vivid
lawns, a sharp river valley that strolls winding amid the mountains.
And just as this river turns before it, it tumbles down a rock slide in
a vast mass of foam, so that even when one cannot see its beauty at
night, its roar can be heard in the wonderful silence of the valley.
On the terrace of the hotel are two bathing-pools fed from the sulphur
springs of Banff, and here Canadians seem to bathe all day until
dance-time--and even slip back for a moonlight bath between dancing and
bed.

It is an ideal place for a holiday, for there is golfing, climbing,
walking and bathing for those whose athletic instincts are not
satisfied with beauty, and automobile rides amid beauty.  And it is, of
course, a perfect place for honeymooners, as one will find by
consulting the Visitors' Book, for with characteristic frankness the
Canadians and Americans sign themselves:

"_Mr. and Mrs. Jack P. Eeks, Spokane.  We are on our honeymoon._"

The Prince spent an afternoon and a morning playing golf amid the
immensities of Banff, or travelling in a swift car along its beautiful
roads.  There are most things in Banff to make man happy, even a coal
mine, sitting like a black and incongruous gnome in the heart of
enchanted hills, to provide heat against mountain chills.

The Prince saw the sulphur spring that bubbles out of quicksand in a
little cavern deep in the hillside--a cavern made almost impregnable by
smell.  In the old days the determined bather had to shin down a pole
through a funnel, and take his curative bath in the rocky oubliette of
the spring.  Now the Government has arranged things better.  It has
carved a dark tunnel to the pool, and carried the water to two big
swimming tanks on the open hillside, where one can take a plunge with
all modern accessories.

From Banff in the afternoon of Thursday, September 18th, the train
carried the Prince through scenery that seemed to accumulate beauty as
he travelled to another eyrie of loveliness, Lake Louise.

At Lake Louise Station the railway is five thousand feet above the
sea-level, but the Château and Lake are yet higher, and the Prince
climbed to them by a motor railway that rises clinging to the
mountain-side, until it twists into woods and mounts upward by the side
of a blue-and-white stream dashing downward, with an occasional
breather in a deep pool, over rocks.

The Château is poised high up in the world on the lip of a small and
perfect lake of poignant blue, that fills the cup made by the meeting
of a ring of massive heights.  At the end of the lake, miles away, but,
thanks to the queerness of mountain perspective, looking close enough
to touch, rises the scarp of Mount Victoria, capped with a vast glacier
that seemed to shine with curious inner lambency under the clear light
of the grey day.  There is a touch of the theatre in that view from the
windows or the broad lawns of the Château, for the mountain and glacier
is a huge back-drop seen behind wings made by the shoulders of other
mountains, and all, rock and spruce woods, as well as the clear shining
of the ice, are mirrored in the perfect lake that makes the floor of
the valley.

Up on one of the shoulders of the lake, hidden away in a screen of
trees, is the home of an English woman.  She used to spend her days
working in a shop in the West End of London until happy chance brought
her to Lake Louise, and she opened a tea chalet high on that lonely
crag.  She has changed from the frowsty airs of her old life to a place
where she can enjoy beauty, health and an income that allows her to fly
off to California when the winter comes.  The Prince went up to take
tea in this chalet of romance and profit during his walk of exercise.

There is another kind of romance in the woods about the Château, and
one of the policemen who guarded the Prince made its acquaintance
during the night.  In the dark he heard the noise of some one moving
amid the trees that come down to the edge of the hotel grounds.  He
thought that some unpleasant intruder on the Prince's privacy was
attempting to sneak in by the back way.  He marched up to the edge of
the wood and waited in his most legal attitude for the intruder--and a
bear came out to meet him.  Not only did it come out to meet him, but
it reared up and waved its paws in a thoroughly militant manner.  The
policeman was a man from the industrial East, and not having been
trained to the habits of bears, decided on a strategic withdrawal.

His experience was one of the next day's jokes, since it appears that
bears often do come out of the woods attracted by the smell of hotel
cooking.  On the whole they are amiable, and are no more difficult than
ordinary human beings marching in the direction of a good dinner.

From Lake Louise the Prince went steadily west through some of the most
impressive scenery in Canada.  The gradient climbs resolutely to the
great lift of petrified earth above Kicking Horse Pass, so that the
train seemed to be steaming across the sky.

A little east of the Pass is a slight monument called "the Great
Divide."  Here Alberta meets British Columbia, and here a stream
springs from the mountains to divide itself east and west, one fork
joining stream after stream, until as a great river it empties into
Hudson Bay; the other, turning west and leaping down the ledges of
valleys, makes for the Pacific.

Beyond "the Great Divide" the titanic Kicking Horse Pass opens out.  It
falls by gigantic levels for 1,300 feet to the dim, spruce-misted
valleys that lie darkly at the foot of the giant mountains.  It is not
a straight canyon, but a series of deeper valleys opening out of deep
valleys round the shoulders of the grim slopes.  Down this tortuous
corridor the railway creeps lower, level by level, going with the
physical caution of a man descending a dangerous slope.

The line feels for its best footholds on the sides of walls that drop
sheer away, and tower sheer above.  We could look over the side down
abrupt precipices, and see through the dense rain of the day the mighty
drop to where the Kicking Horse River, after leaping over rocky ramps
and flowing through level pools, ran in a score of channels on the wide
shingly floor of the Pass.

Beneath us as we descended we could see the track twisting and looping,
as it sought by tunnelling to conquer the exacting gradient.  The
planning of the line is, in its own way, as wonderful as the natural
marvel of the Pass.  One is filled with awe at the vision, the genius
and the tenacity of those great railway men who had seen a way over
this grim mountain barrier, had schemed their line and had mastered
nature.

At Yoho Station that clings like a limpet near the top of this soaring
barrier, the Prince took to horse, and rode down trails that wind along
the mountainside through thickets of trees to Field at the foot of the
drop.  The rain was driving up the throat of the valley before a strong
wind, and it was not a good day for riding, even in woolly chaps such
as he wore, but he set out at a gallop, and enjoyed the exercise and
the scenery, which is barbaric and tremendous, though here and there it
was etherealized by sudden gleams of sunlight playing on the wet
foliage of the mountain-side and turning the wet masses into rainbows.

During this ride he passed under the stain in a sheer wall of rock that
gives the Pass its name.  For some geological reason there is, high up
in a straight mass of white towering cliff, a black outcrop that is
like the silhouette of an Indian on a horse.  I could not distinguish
the kick in the horse myself, but I was assured it was there, and
Kicking Horse is thus named.

From Field, a breathing space for trains, about which has grown a small
village possessing one good hotel, the Prince rode up the valleys to
some of the beauty spots, such as Emerald Lake, which lies high in the
sky under the cold glaciers of Mount Burgess.  It was a wonderful ride
through the spruce and balsam woods of these high valleys.

IV

During Saturday, September 20th, the train was yet in the mountains,
and the scenery continued to be magnificent.  From Field the line works
down to the level of the Columbia River, some 1,500 feet lower, through
magnificent stretches of mountain panorama, and through breathless
gorges like the Palliser, before climbing again steeply to the highest
point of the Selkirk Range.  Here the train seemed to charge straight
at the towering wall of Mount MacDonald, but only because there is a
miracle of a tunnel--Connaught Tunnel--which coaxes the line down by
easy grades to Rogers Pass, the Illicilliwaet and Albert Canyon.
Through all this stretch the scenery is superb.  In the gorges and the
canyon high mountains force the river and railway together, until the
train runs in a semi-darkness between sheer cliffs, with the water
foaming and tearing itself forward in pent-up fury between harsh, rocky
walls.  Sometimes these walls encroach until the water channel is
forced between two rocks standing up like doorposts, with not much more
than a doorway space between them.  Through these gateways the volume
of water surges with an indescribable sense of power.

At places, as in the valley of the Beavermouth, east of the Connaught
Tunnel, the line climbs hugely upward on the sides of great ranges,
and, on precarious ledges, hangs above a gigantic floor, tree-clad and
fretted with water channels.  The train crept over spidery bridges,
spanning waterdrops, and crawled for miles beneath ranges of big timber
snowsheds.

The train stopped at the pleasant little mountain town of Golden, where
the Prince went "ashore," and there was the ceremony of reception.
This was on the program.  The next stop was not.

West of the Albert Canyon, at a tiny station called Twin Butte, we
passed another train standing in a siding, with a long straggle of men
in khaki waiting on the platform and along the track, looking at us as
we swept along.  Abruptly we ceased to sweep along.  The communication
cord had been pulled, and we stopped with a jerk.

The Prince had caught sight of the soldiers, and had recognized who
they were.  He had given orders to pull up, and almost before the
brakes had ground home, he was out on the track and among the men,
speaking to them and the officers, who were delighted at this
unexpected meeting.

The soldiers were English.  They were men of the 25th Middlesex, H.A.C.
and other regiments, four hundred all told.  They had come from Omsk,
in Russia, by way of the Pacific, and were being railed from Vancouver
to Montreal in order to take ship for home.  The men of the Middlesex
were those made famous by the sinking of their trooper off the African
coast in 1916.  Their behaviour then had been so admirable that it will
be remembered the King cabled to them, "Well done, Diehards!"

By the isolated railway station and under the lonely mountains so far
from their homes, they were drawn up, and the Prince made an informal
inspection of the men who had been so long away, and who had travelled
the long road from Siberia on their way Blightyward.

The inspection lasted only a few minutes, and the episode, spontaneous
as it was characteristic, scarcely broke the run into Revelstoke.  But
it was the happiest of meetings.

Revelstoke is a small, bright mountain town known, as its inhabitants
say, for snow and strawberries.  It is their way of explaining that the
land in this deep mountain valley is splendidly fertile, and that
settlers have only to farm on a small scale in order to make a
comfortable living, though in winter it is--well, of the mountains.
The fishing there is also extremely good, and we were told almost
fabulous tales of boys who on their journey home from school spent a
few minutes at the creeks of the Columbia River, and went on their way
bearing enough fish to make a dinner for a big family.

The chief feature of Revelstoke's reception was a motor run up
Revelstoke mountain, a four thousand feet ride up a stiffish road that
climbed by corkscrew bends.  This was thrilling enough, for there were
abrupt depths when we saw Revelstoke far down on the valley floor
looking neat and doll-like from this airman's eye-view, and we had to
cross frail wooden bridges spanning deep crevices, some of them at ugly
corners.

From Revelstoke the train went on to Sicamous, where it remained until
the middle of Sunday, September 21st.  Sicamous is merely an hotel and
a few houses beside a very beautiful lake.  It is a splendid fishing
centre, for a chain of lakes stretches south through the valleys to
Okanagan.  A branch line serves this district (which we were to explore
later), where there are rich orchard lands.

With Revelstoke, Sicamous acts as a distributing centre for the big
Kootenay areas, that romantic land of the earliest trail breakers,
those dramatic fellows who pushed all ways through the forest-clad
valleys after gold and silver, and the other rich rewards of the
prospector.  Even now the country has only been tapped, and there are
many new discoveries of ore in the grim rock of the district.

A short stop at Kamloops on Sunday, September 21st, and then a straight
run through the night brought us to Vancouver, with just a note of
interest outside the Pacific city.  For miles we passed dumps of war
material, shells, ammunition boxes, the usual material of armies.  It
was lying discarded and decaying, and it told a tragic story.  It was
the war material that the Allies had prepared for Russia.  These were
the dumps that fed the transports for Russia plying from Vancouver.
After the peace of Brest-Litovsk all work ceased about them, and there
they remained to that day, monuments to the Bolshevik Peace.

CHAPTER XVII

THE PACIFIC CITIES: VANCOUVER AND VICTORIA, BRITISH COLUMBIA

Vancouver was land after a mountain voyage.  With the feelings of a
seafarer seeing cliffs after a long ocean journey, we reached common,
flat country and saw homely asphalt streets.

There can be no two points of view concerning the beauty and grandeur
of the mountain scenery through which the Prince had passed, but after
a succession of even the most stimulating gorges and glaciers one does
turn gladly to a little humanity in the lump.  Vancouver was humanity
in the lump, an exceedingly large lump and of peculiarly warm and
generous emotions.  We were glad to meet crowds once more.

There are some adequate streets in this great western port of Canada.
When Vancouver planned such opulent boulevards as Granville and Georgia
streets, it must have been thinking hard about posterity, which will
want a lot of space if only to drive its superabundant motors.  But
splendid and wide and long though these and other streets be, the mass
of people which lined them on Monday, September 22nd, was such as to
set the most long-headed town planner wondering if, after all, he had
allowed enough room for the welcoming of Princes.

From the vast, orderly throng massed behind the red and tartan of the
Highland guard of honour at the station, thick ranks of people lined
the whole of a long route to Stanley Park.

This crowd not only filled the sidewalks with good-tempered liveliness,
but it had sections in all the windows of the fine blocks of buildings
the Prince passed.  Now and then it attempted to emulate the small boys
who ran level with the Prince's car cheering to full capacity, and
caring not a jot whether a "Mounty" of the escort or a following car
went over them, but on the whole the crowd was more in hand than usual.

This does not mean that it was less enthusiastic.  The reception was of
the usual stirring quality, and it culminated in an immense outburst in
Stanley Park.

It was a touch of genius to place the official reception in the Park.
It is, in a sense, the key-note of Vancouver.  It gives it its peculiar
quality of charm.  It is a huge park occupying the entirety of a
peninsula extending from the larger peninsula upon which Vancouver
stands.  It has sea-water practically all round it.  In it are to be
found the greatest and finest trees in Canada in their most natural
surroundings.

It is one big "reservation" for trees.  Those who think that they can
improve upon nature have had short shrift, and the giant Douglas pine,
the firs and the cedars thrive naturally in a setting that has remained
practically untouched since the day when the British seaman, Captain
Vancouver, explored the sounds of this coast.  It is an exquisite park
having delightful forest walks and beautiful waterside views.

Under the great trees and in a wilderness of bright flowers and flags
as bright, a vast concourse of people was gathered about the pretty
pavilion in the park to give the Prince a welcome.  The function had
all the informality of a rather large picnic, and when the sun banished
the Pacific "smoke," or mist, the gathering had infinite charm.

After this reception the Prince went for a short drive in the great
park, seeing its beautiful glades; looking at Burrard Inlet that makes
its harbour one of the best in the world, and getting a glimpse of
English Bay, where the sandy bathing beaches make it one of the best
sea-side resorts in the world as well.  At all points of the drive
there were crowds.  And while most of those on the sidewalks were
Canadian, there was also, as at "Soo," a good sprinkling of Americans.
They had come up from Seattle and Washington county to have a
first-hand look at the Prince, and perhaps to "jump" New York and the
eastern Washington in a racial desire to get in first.

In this long drive, as well as during the visit we paid to Vancouver on
our return from Victoria, there was a considerable amount of that mist
which the inhabitants call "smoke," because it is said to be the result
of forest fires along the coast, in the air.  Yet in spite of the mist
we had a definite impression of a fine, spacious city, beautifully
situated and well planned, with distinguished buildings.  And an
impression of people who occupy themselves with the arts of business,
progress and living as becomes a port not merely great now, but
ordained to be greater tomorrow.

It is a city of very definite attraction, as perhaps one imagined it
would be, from a place that links directly with the magical Orient, and
trades in silks and tea and rice, and all the romantic things of those
lands, as well as in lumber and grain with all the colourful towns that
fringe the wonderful Pacific Coast.

Vancouver has been the victim of the "boom years."  Under the spell of
that "get-rich-quick" impulse, it outgrew its strength.  It is getting
over that debility now (and perhaps, after all, the "boomsters" were
right, if their method was anticipatory) and a fine strength is coming
to it.  When conditions ease and requisitioned shipping returns to its
wharves, and its own building yards make up the lacking keels, it
should climb steadily to its right position as one of the greatest
ports in the British Empire.

II

Vancouver, as it is today, is a peculiarly British town.  Its climate
is rather British, for its winter season has a great deal of rain where
other parts of Canada have snow, and its climate is Britishly warm and
soft.  It attracts, too, a great many settlers from home, its
newspapers print more British news than one usually finds in Canadian
papers (excepting such great Eastern papers as, for instance, _The
Montreal Gazette_), and its atmosphere, while genuinely Canadian, has
an English tone.

There is not a little of America, too, in its air, for great American
towns like Seattle are very close across the border--in fact one can
take a "jitney" to the United States as an ordinary item of
sightseeing.  Under these circumstances it was not unnatural that there
should be an interesting touch of America in the day's functions.

The big United States battleship _New Mexico_ and some destroyers were
lying in the harbour, and part of the Prince's program was to have
visited Admiral Rodman, who commanded.  The ships, however, were in
quarantine, and this visit had to be put off, though the Admiral
himself was a guest at the brilliant luncheon in the attractive
Vancouver Hotel, when representatives from every branch of civic life
in greater Vancouver came together to meet the Prince.

In his speech the Prince made direct reference to the American Navy,
and to the splendid work it had accomplished in the war.  He spoke
first of Vancouver, and its position, now and in the future, as one of
the greatest bases of British sea power.  Vancouver, he explained, also
brought him nearer to those other great countries in the British
Dominions, Australia and New Zealand, and it seemed to him it was a
fitting link in the chain of unity and co-operation--a chain made more
firm by the war--that the British Empire stretched round the world.  It
was a chain, he felt, of kindred races inspired by kindred ideals.
Such ideals were made more apparent by the recent and lamented death of
that great man, General Botha, who, from being an Africander leader in
the war against the British eighteen years ago, had yet lived to be one
of the British signatories at the Treaty of Versailles.  Nothing else
could express so significantly the breadth, justice and generosity of
the British spirit and cause.

Turning to Admiral Rodman, he went on to say that he felt that that
spirit had its kinship in America, whose Admiral had served with the
Grand Fleet.  Of the value of the work those American ships under
Admiral Rodman did, there could be no doubt.  He had helped the Allies
with a most magnificent and efficient unit.

At no other place had the response exceeded the warmth shown that day.
The Prince's manner had been direct and statesmanlike, each of his
points was clearly uttered, and the audience showed a keen quickness in
picking them up.

Admiral Rodman, a heavily-built figure, with the American light,
dryness of wit, gave a new synonym for the word "Allies"; to him that
word meant "Victory."  It was the combination of every effort of every
Ally that had won the war.  Yet, at the same time, practical experience
had taught him to feel that if it had not been for the way the Grand
Fleet had done its duty from the very outset, the result of the war
would have been diametrically opposite.  Feelingly, he described his
service with the Grand Fleet.  He had placed himself unreservedly under
the command of the British from the moment he had entered European
waters, yet so complete was the co-operation between British and
Americans that he often took command of British units.  The splendid
war experience had done much to draw the great Anglo-Saxon nations
together.  Their years together had ripened into friendship, then into
comradeship, then into brotherhood.  And that brotherhood he wished to
see enduring, so that if ever the occasion should again arise all men
of Anglo-Saxon strain should stand together.

There was real warmth of enthusiasm as the Admiral spoke.  Those
present, whose homes are close to those of their American neighbours
living across a frontier without fortifications, in themselves
appreciated the essential sympathy that exists between the two great
nations.  When the Admiral conveyed to the Prince a warm invitation to
visit the United States, this enthusiasm reached its highest point.  It
was, in its way, an international lunch, and a happy one.

After reviewing the Great War Veterans on the quay-side, the Prince
left Vancouver just before lunch time on Tuesday, September 23rd, for
Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, which lies across the water
on Vancouver Island.

It was a short run of five hours in one of the most comfortable boats I
have ever been in--the _Princess Alice_, which is on the regular C.P.R.
service, taking in the fjords and towns of the British Columbian coast.

Leaving Vancouver, where the towering buildings give an authentic air
of modern romance to the skyline, a sense of glamour went with us
across the sea.  The air was still tinged with "smoke" and the fabled
blue of the Pacific was not apparent, but we could see curiously close
at hand the white cowl of Mount Baker, which is America, and we passed
on a zig-zag course through the scattered St. Juan Islands, each of
which seemed to be charming and lonely enough to stage a Jack London
story.

On the headlands or beaches of these islands there were always men and
women and children to wave flags and handkerchiefs, and to send a cheer
across the water to the Prince.  One is surprised, so much is the
romantic spell upon one, that the people on these islets of loneliness
should know that the Prince was coming, that is, one is surprised until
one realizes that this is Canada, and that telegraphs and telephones
and up-to-date means of communication are commonplaces here as
everywhere.

Romance certainly invades one on entering Victoria.  It seems a city
out of a kingdom of Anthony Hope's, taken in hand by a modern Canadian
administration.  Steaming up James Bay to the harbour landing one feels
that it is a sparkling city where the brightest things in thrilling
fiction might easily happen.

The bay goes squarely up to a promenade.  Behind the stone balustrade
is a great lawn, and beyond that, amid trees, is a finely decorative
building, a fitted back-ground to any romance, though it is actually an
_hôtel de luxe_.  To the left of the square head of the water is a
distinguished pile; it is the Customs House, but it might be a temple
of dark machinations.  To the right is a rambling building, ornate and
attractive, with low, decorated domes and outflung and rococo wings.
That could easily be the palace of at least a sub-rosa royalty, though
it is the House of Parliament.  The whole of this square grouping of
green grass and white buildings, in the particularly gracious air of
Victoria gives a glamorous quality to the scene.

Victoria's welcome to the Prince was modern enough.   Boat sirens and
factory hooters loosed a loud welcome as the steamer came in.  A huge
derrick arm that stretched a giant legend of _Welcome_ out into the
harbour, swung that sign to face the _Princess Alice_ all the time she
was passing, and then kept pace on its rail track so that _Welcome_
should always be abreast of the Prince.

The welcome, too, of the crowds on that day when he landed, and on the
next when he attended functions at the Parliament buildings, was as
Canadian and up-to-date as anywhere else in the Dominion.  The crowds
were immense, and, at one time, when little girls stood on the edge of
a path to strew roses in front of him as he walked, there was some
danger of the eager throngs submerging both the little girls and the
charming ceremony in anxiety to get close to him.

The crowd in Parliament Square during the ceremonies of Wednesday,
September 24th, was prodigious.  From the hotel windows the whole of
the great green space before the Parliament buildings was seen black
with people who stayed for hours in the hope of catching sight of the
Prince as he went from one ceremony to another.

It was a gathering of many races.  There were Canadians born and
Canadians by residence.  Vivid American girls come by steamer from
Seattle were there.  There were men and women from all races in Europe,
some of them Canadians now, some to be Canadians presently.  There were
Chinese and Japanese in greater numbers than we had seen elsewhere, for
Victoria is the nearest Canadian city to the East.  There were Hindus,
and near them survivors of the aboriginal race, the Songhish Indians,
who lorded it in Vancouver Island before the white man came.

And giving a special quality to this big cosmopolitan gathering was the
curious definitely English air of Victoria.  It is the most English of
Canadian cities.  Its even climate is the most English, and its air of
well-furnished leisure is English.  Because of this, or perhaps I
should say the reason for this is that it is the home of many
Englishmen.  Not only do settlers from England come here in numbers,
but many English families, particularly those from the Orient East, who
get to know its charms when travelling through it on their way across
Canada and home, come here to live when they retire.  And this
distinctly English atmosphere gets support in great measure from the
number of rich Canadians who, on ceasing their life's work, come here
to live in leisure.

Yet though this is responsible for the growing up in Victoria of some
of the most beautiful residential districts in Canada, where beautiful
houses combine with the lovely scenery of country and sea in giving the
city and its environments a delightful charm, Victoria is vigorously
industrial too.

It has shipbuilding and a brisk commerce in lumber, machinery and a
score of other manufactories, and it serves both the East and the
Canadian and American coast.  It has fine, straight, broad streets,
lined with many distinguished buildings, and its charm has virility as
well as ease.

IV

The Prince made a long break in his tour here, remaining until Sunday,
September 28th.  Most of this stay was given over to restful exercise;
he played golf and went for rides through the beautiful countryside.
There were several functions on his program, however.  He visited the
old Navy Yard and School at Esquimault, and he took a trip on the
Island railway to Duncan, Ladysmith, Nanaimo and Qualicum.

At each of these towns he had a characteristic welcome, and at some
gained an insight into local industries, such as lumbering and the
clearing of land for farming.  On the return journey he mounted the
engine cab and came most of the way home in this fashion.

The country in the Island is serene and attractive, extremely like
England, being reminiscent of the rolling wooded towns in Surrey,
though the Englishman misses the hedges.  The many sea inlets add
beauty to the scenery, and there are delightful rides along roads that
alternately run along the water's edge, or hang above these fjords on
high cliff ledges.

In one of our inland drives we were taken to an extraordinary and
beautiful garden.  It is a serene place, laid out with exquisite skill.
In one part of it an old quarry has been turned into a sunken garden.
Here with straight cliffs all round there nests a wilderness of
flowers.  Small, artificial crags have been reared amid the rockeries
and the flowers, and by small, artificial paths one can climb them.  A
stream cascades down the cliff, and flows like a beautiful toy-thing
through the dainty artificial scenery.

In another part of the grounds is a Japanese garden, with tiny pools
and moon bridges and bamboo arbours--and flowers and flowers and
flowers.  And not only does the maker of this enchanted spot throw it
open to the public, but he has built for visitors a delightful chalet
where they can take tea.  This chalet is a big, comely hall, with easy
chairs and gate tables.  It is provided with all the American
magazines.  In a tiny outbuilding is a scullery with cups and saucers
and plates and teapots--all for visitors.

The visitors take their own food, and use these articles.  The Chinese
cook at the house near by provides boiling water, and all the owner
asks is that those who use his crockery shall wash it up at the sink
provided, and with the dish-cloths provided, and leave it in readiness
for the next comer.

That generosity is the final and completing touch to the charm of that
exquisite place, which is a veritable "Garden of Allah" amid the
beauties of Canadian scenery.

Another drive was over the Malahat Pass, through superb country, to a
big lumber camp on Shawnigan Lake.  Here we saw the whole of the
operations of lumbering from the point where a logger notches a likely
tree for cutting to the final moment when Chinese workmen feed the
great trunks to the steam saw that hews them into beams and planks.

Having selected a tree, the first logger cuts into it a deep wedge
which is to give it direction in its fall.  These men show an almost
uncanny skill.  They get the line of a great tree with the handle of
their axes, as an artist uses a pencil, and they can cut their notches
so accurately that they can "fall" a tree on a pocket-handkerchief.

Two men follow this expert.  They cut smaller notches in the tree, and
insert their "boards" into it.  These "boards" have a steel claw which
bites into the tree when the men stand on the board, the idea being
both to raise the cutters above the sprawling roots, and to give their
swing on the saw an elasticity.  It is because they cut so high that
Canada is covered with tall stumps that make clearing a problem.  The
stumps are generally dynamited, or torn up by the roots by cables that
pass through a block on the top of a tree to the winding-drum of a
donkey-engine.

When the men at the saw have cut nearly through the tree, they sing out
a drawling, musical "Stand aw-ay," gauging the moment with the skill of
woodsmen, for there is no sign to the lay eye.  In a few moments the
giant tree begins to fall stiffly.  It moves slowly, and then with its
curious rigidity tears swiftly through the branches of neighbouring
trees, coming to the ground with a thump very much like the sound of an
H.E. shell, and throwing up a red cloud of torn bark.  The sight of a
tree falling is a moving thing; it seems almost cruel to bring it down.

A donkey-engine mounted on big logs, that has pulled itself into place
by the simple method of anchoring its steel rope to a distant tree--and
pulling, jerks the great trunks out of the heart of the forest.  A
block and tackle are hitched to the top of a tall tree that has been
left standing in a clearing, and the steel ropes are placed round the
fallen trunks.  As this lifting line pulls them from their
resting-place, they come leaping and jerking forward, charging down
bushes, rising over stumps, dropping and hurdling over mounds until it
seems that they are actually living things struggling to escape.  The
ubiquitous donkey-engine loads the great logs on trucks, and an engine,
not very much bigger than a donkey-engine, tows the long cars of timber
down over a sketchy track to the waterside.

Here the loads are tipped with enormous splashes into the water to wait
in the "booms" until they are wanted at the mill.  Then they are towed
across, sure-footed men jump on to them and steer them to the big
chute, where grappling teeth catch them and pull them up until they
reach the sawing platform.  They are jerked on to a movable truck, that
grips them, and turns them about with mechanical arms into the required
position for cutting, and then log and truck are driven at the saw
blade, which slices beams or planks out of the primitive trunk with an
almost sinister ease.

Uncanny machines are everywhere in this mill.  Machines carve shingles
and battens or billets with an almost human accuracy.  A conveyor
removes all sawdust from the danger of lights with mechanical
intelligence.  Another carries off all the scrapwood and takes it away
to a safe place in the mill yard where a big, wire-hooded furnace,
something like a straight hop oast-house, burns every scrap of it.

The life in the lumber camp is a hard life, but it is well paid, it is
independent, and the food is a revelation.  The loggers' lunch we were
given was a meal fit for gourmets.  It was in a rough pitch-pine hut at
rough tables.  Clam-soup was served to us in cylindrical preserved meat
cans on which the maker's labels still clung--but it lost none of its
delightful flavour for that.  Beef was served cut in strips in a great
bowl, and we all reached out for the vegetables.  There were mammothine
bowls of mixed salad possessing an astonishing (to British eyes)
lavishness of hard-boiled egg, lemon pie (lemon curd pie) with a
whipped-egg crown, deep apple pie (the logger eats pie--which many
people will know better as "tart"--three times a day), a marvellous
fruit salad in jelly, and the finest selection of plums, peaches,
apples, and oranges I had seen for a long day.

I was told that this was the regular meal of the loggers, and I know it
was cooked by a chef (there is a French or Belgian or Canadian chef in
most logging camps), for I talked with him.  To live in a lonely
forest, in a shack, and to work tremendously hard, may not be all the
life a man wants, but it has compensations.

I understand that just about then the lumbermen were prone to striking.
In one place they were demanding sheets, and in another they had
refused to work because, having ordered two cases of eggs from a store,
the tradesman had only been able to send the one he had in stock.

While we were in this camp we had some experience of the danger of
forest fires.  We had walked up to the head of the clearing, when one
of the men of a group we had left working a short distance behind, came
running up to say a fire had started.  We went back, and in a place
where, ten minutes before, there had been no sign of fire, flames and
smoke were rising over an area of about one hundred yards square.
Little tongues of flame were racing over the "slashings" (_i.e._, the
débris of bark and splintered limbs that litter an area which has been
cut), snakes of flame were writhing up standing trees, sparks blown by
the wind were dropping into the dry "slashings" twenty, thirty and
fifty yards away and starting fresh fires.  We could see with what
incredible rapidity these fires travelled, and how dangerous they can
be once they are well alight.  This fire was surrounded, and got under
with water and shovelled earth, but we were shown a big stretch of
hillside which another such fire had swept bare in a little under two
hours.  The summer is the dangerous time, for "slashings" and forests
are then dry, and one chance spark from a badly screened donkey-engine
chimney will start a blaze.  When the fire gets into wet and green wood
it soon expires.

These drives, for us, were the major events in an off time, for there
was very little happening until the night of the 28th, when we went on
board the _Princess Alice_ again, to start on our return journey.

CHAPTER XVIII

APPLE LAND: OKANAGAN AND KOOTENAY LAKES

On Monday, September 29th, the Prince of Wales returned to Vancouver
and took car to New Westminster, the old capital of British Columbia
before picturesque Victoria assumed the reins.

New Westminster was having its own festival that day, so the visit was
well timed.  The local exhibition was to begin, and the Prince was to
perform the opening ceremony.  Under many fine arches, one a tall
torii, erected by Chinese and Japanese Canadians, the procession of
cars passed through the town, on a broad avenue that runs alongside the
great Fraser River.  Drawn up at the curb were many floats that were to
take part in the trades' procession through the town to the exhibition
grounds.  Most of them were ingenious and attractive.  There were
telegraph stations on wagons, corn dealers' shops, and the like, while
on the bonnet of one car was a doll nurse, busy beside a doll bed.
Another automobile had turned itself into an aeroplane, while another
had obliterated itself under a giant bully beef can to advertise a
special kind of tinned meat.

All cars were decorated with masses of spruce and maple leaf, now
beautiful in autumn tints of crimson and gold.  And Peace and
Britannia, of course, were there with attendant angels and nations,
comely girls whose celestial and symbolical garments did not seem to be
the right fashion for a day with more than a touch of chill in the air.

Through this avenue of fantasy, colour and cheery humanity the Prince
drove through the town, which seems to have the air of brooding over
its past, to the exhibition ground, which he opened, and where he
presented medals to many soldiers.

II

From New Westminster the Royal train struck upward through the Rocky
Mountains by way of the Kettle Valley.  It passed through a land of
terrific and magnificent scenery.  It equalled anything we had seen in
the more famous beauty spots, but it was more savage.  The valleys
appeared closer knit and deeper, and the sharp and steep mountains
pinched the railway and river gorges together until we seemed to be
creeping along the floor of a mighty passage-way of the dark,
aboriginal gods.

Again and again the train was hanging over the deep, misted cauldron of
the valley, again and again it slipped delicately over the span of
cobweb across the sky that is a Canadian bridge.  In this land of steep
gradients, sharp curves and lattice bridges, the train was divided into
two sections, and each, with two engines to pull it, climbed through
the mountain passes.

This tract of country has only within the last few years been tapped by
a railway that seems even yet to have to fight its way forward against
Nature, barbarous, splendid and untamed.  It was built to the usual
ideal of Canada, that vision which ignores the handicaps of today for
the promise of tomorrow.  Yet even today it taps the rich lake valleys
where mining and general farming is carried on, and where there are
miles of orchards already growing some of the finest apples and peaches
in Canada.

On the morning of Tuesday, September 30th, the train climbed down from
the higher and rougher levels to Penticton, a small, bright, growing
town that stands as focus for the immense fruit-growing district about
Okanagan Lake.

Here, after a short ceremony, the Prince boarded the steamer
_Sicamous_, a lake boat of real Canadian brand; a long white vessel
built up in an extraordinary number of tiers, so that it looked like an
elaborate wedding-cake, but a useful craft whose humpy stern
paddle-wheel can push her through a six-foot shallow or deep water with
equal dispatch.  And a delightfully comfortable boat into the bargain,
with well-sheltered and spacious decks, cosy cabins and bath-rooms, and
a big dining saloon, which, placed in the very centre of the ship with
the various galleries of the decks rising around it, has an air of
belonging to one of those attractive old Dickensian inns.

On this vessel the Prince was carried the whole length of Okanagan
Lake, which winds like a blue fillet between mountains for seventy
miles.  On the ledges and in the tight valleys of these heights he saw
the formal ranks of a multitude of orchards.

A short distance along the lake the _Sicamous_ pulled in to the toy
quay of Summerland, a town born of and existing for fruit, and linked
up with the outer world by the C.P.R. Lake Service that owned our own
vessel.

All the children of Summerland had collected on the quayside to sing to
and to cheer the Prince, and, as he stood on the upper deck and waved
his hat cheerfully at them, they cheered a good deal more.  When he
went ashore and was taken by the grown-up Olympians to examine the
grading and packing sheds, where the fruits of all the orchards are
handled and graded by mechanical means, prepared for the market, and
sold on the co-operative plan, the kiddies exchanged sallies with those
waiting on the vessel, flipped big apples up at them, and cheered or
jeered as they were caught or missed.

The _Sicamous_ went close inshore at Peachland, another daughter town
of Mother Fruit, to salute the crowd of people who had come out from
the pretty bungalow houses that nestle among the green trees on a low
and pretty shore, and who stood on the quay in a mass to send a cheer
to him.

At Okanagan Landing, at the end of the lake, he took car to Vernon, a
purposeful and attractive town which is the commercial heart of the
apple industry.  Indeed, there was no need to ask the reason for
Vernon's being.  Even the decorations were wrought out of apples, and
under an arch of bright, cherry-red apples the Prince passed on to the
sports ground, and on to a platform the corner posts of which were
crowned with pyramids of apples, and in the centre of which was a model
apple large enough to suit the appetite of Gargantua.

In front of this platform was a grand stand crowded with children of
all races from Scandinavian to Oriental, and these sang with the
resistless heartiness of Canada.  The Oriental is a pretty useful asset
in British Columbia, for in addition to his gifts of industry he is an
excellent agriculturist.

After the ceremonies the Prince had an orgy of orchards.

Fruit growing is done with a large gesture.  The orchards are neat and
young and huge.  In a run of many miles the Prince passed between
masses of precisely aligned trees, and every tree was thick with bright
and gleaming red fruit.  Thick, indeed, is a mild word.  The short
trees seemed practically all fruit, as though they had got into the
habit of growing apples instead of leaves.  Many of the branches bore
so excessive a burden that they had been torn out by the weight of the
fruit upon them.

It was a marvellous pageant of fruit in mass.  And the apples
themselves were of splendid quality, big and firm and glowing, each a
perfect specimen of its school.  We were able to judge because the
land-girls, after tossing aprons full of specimens (not always
accurately) into the Prince's car, had enough ammunition left over for
the automobiles that followed.

Attractive land girls they were, too.  Not garbed like British
land-girls, but having all their dashing qualities.  Being Canadians
they carried the love of silk stockings on to the land, and it was
strange to see this feminine extremity under the blue linen overall
trousers or knickers.  They were cheery, sun-tanned, laughing girls.
They were ready for the Prince at every gate and every orchard fence,
eager and ready to supplement their gay enthusiasm with this apple
confetti.

The Prince stopped here and there to chat with fruit growers, and to
congratulate them on their fine showing.  Now he stopped to talk to a
wounded officer, who had been so cruelly used in the war that he had to
support himself on two sticks.  Now he stopped to pass a "How d'y' do"
to a mob of trousered land-girls who gathered brightly about his car,
showing himself as laughing and as cheerful as they.

The cars left the land of growing apples and turned down the lake in a
superb run of thirty-six miles to Kelowna.  This road skirts fairyland.
It winds high up on a shoulder above Long Lake, that makes a floor of
living azure between the buttresses and slopes of the mountains.  Only
when it is tired of the heights does it drop to the lake level, and
sweeping through a filigree of trees, speeds along a road that is but
an inch or two above the still mirror of Wood Lake, on the polished
surface of which there is a delicate fret of small, rocky islets.  So,
in magnificent fashion, he came to Kelowna, and the _Sicamous_, that
carried him back to the train.

Through the night and during the next morning the train carried the
Prince deeper in the mountains, skirting in amazing loops, when the
train seemed almost to be biting its tail, steep rocky cliffs above
white torrents, or the shining blue surfaces of lakes such as Arrow
Lake, that formed the polished floor of valleys.  Now and then we
passed purposeful falls, and by them the power houses that won light
and motive force for the valley towns from the falling water.  There
are those who fear the harnessing of water-power, because it may mean
the spoiling of beautiful scenery.  Such buildings as I saw in no way
marred the view, but rather added to it a touch of human
picturesqueness.

Creeping down the levels, with discretion at the curves, the train came
in the rain to Nelson on Wednesday, October 1st.  Rain spoilt the
reception at Nelson, a town that thrives upon the agricultural and
mining products of the hills about.  There seemed to be a touch of
mining grey in the air of the town, but, as in all towns of Canada, no
sense of unhappiness, no sense of poverty--indeed, in the whole of
Canada I saw five beggars and no more (though, of course, there may
have been more).  Of these one man was blind, and two were badly
crippled soldiers.

There are no poor in Nelson, so I was told, and no unemployed.

"If a man's unemployed," said a Councillor with a twinkle in his eye,
"he's due for the penitentiary.  With labourers getting five dollars a
day, and being able to demand it because of the scarcity of their kind,
when a man who says he can't find work has something wrong with him ...
as a matter of fact the penitentiary idea is only speculative.  There's
never been a test case of this kind."

I don't suppose there have been many test cases of that kind in the
whole of Canada, for certainly "the everyday people" everywhere have a
cheerful and self-dependent look.

At Nelson the Prince embarked on another lake boat, the _Nasookin_,
after congratulating rival bands, one of brass, and one (mainly boys)
of bagpipes, on their tenacity in tune in the rain.  Nelson gave him a
very jolly send-off.  The people managed to invade the quay in great
numbers, and those who were daring clambered to the top of the freight
cars standing on the wharf, the better to give him a cheer.

As the boat steamed out into the Kootenay River scores of the nattiest
little gasoline launches flying flags escorted him for the first mile
or so, chugging along beside the _Nasookin_, or falling in our wake in
a bright procession of boats.  Encouraged by the "movie" men they waved
vigorously, and many good "shoots" of them were filmed.

At Balfour, where the narrow river, after passing many homesteads of
great charm nestling amid the greenery of the low shore that fringes
the high mountains, turns into Kootenay Lake, the Prince went ashore.
Here is a delightful chalet which was once an hotel, but is now a
sanatorium for Canadian soldiers.  Its position is idyllic.  It stands
above river and lake, with the fine mountains backing it, and across
the river are high mountains.

Over these great slopes on this grey day clouds were gathered, crawling
down the shoulders in billows, or blowing in odd and disconnected
masses and streamers.  These odd ragged scarves and billows look like
strayed sheep from the cloud fold, lost in the deep valleys that sit
between the blue-grey mountain sides.

The Prince spent some time visiting the sanatorium, and chatting with
the inmates, and then played golf on the course here.  The C.P.R. were,
meanwhile, indulging themselves in one of their habitual feats.  The
lakes make a gap in the line between Nelson, or rather Balfour siding,
and Kootenay Landing at the head of the water.  Over this water-jump
the whole train, solid steel and weighing a thousand tons, was bodily
carried.

Two great barges were used.  The long cars were backed on to these with
delicate skill--for the slightest waywardness of a heavy, all-steel car
on a floating barge is a matter of danger, and each loaded barge was
then taken up the lake by a tug grappled alongside.

At Kootenay Landing the delicate process was reversed, and all was
carried out without mishap though it was a dark night, and the
railwaymen had to work with the aid of searchlights.  Kootenay Landing
is, in itself, something of a wonder.  In the dark, as we waited for
the train to be made up, it seemed as solid as good hard land can make
it.  But as the big Canadian engine came up with the first car we felt
our "earth" sway slightly, and in the beam of the big headlight we saw
the reason.  Kootenay Landing is a station in the air.  It is built up
on piles.

CHAPTER XIX

THE PRAIRIES AGAIN

In cold weather and through a snowfall that had powdered the slopes and
foothills of the Rocky Mountains the Prince, on Thursday, October 2nd,
reached the prairies again.  Now he was travelling well to the south of
his former journey on a line that ran just above the American border.

In this bleak and rolling land he was to call in the next two days at a
series of small towns whose very names--McLeod, Lethbridge, Medicine
Hat, Maple Creek, Swift Current, Moose Jaw and Regina--had in them a
savour of the old, brave days when the Red Man was still a power, and
settlers chose their names off-hand from local things.

McLeod, on the Old Man River, just escapes the foothills.  It is
prairies, a few streets, a movie "joint," an hotel and a golf course.
In McLeod we saw the dawn of the Mackinaw, or anyhow first saw the
virtues of that strange coat which seems to have been adapted from the
original of the Biblical Joseph by a Highland tailor.  It is a thick,
frieze garment, cut in Norfolk style.  The colour is heroic red, or
blue or mauve or cinnamon, over which black lines are laid in a plaid
tracery.

We realized its value as a warmth-giver while we stood amid a crowd of
them as the Prince received addresses.  Among the crowd was a band of
Blood Indians of the Blackfeet Tribe, whose complexions in the cold
looked blue under their habitual brown-red.  They had come to lay their
homage before him and to present an Indian robe.  The Prince shook
hands and chatted with the chiefs as well as their squaws, and with the
missionary who had spent his life among these Red Men, and had
succeeded in mastering the four or five sounds that make up the Indian
language.

We talked to an old chief upon whose breast were the large silver
medals that Queen Victoria and King George had had specially struck for
their Indian subjects.  These have become signs of chieftainship, and
are taken over by the new chief when he is elected by the tribesmen.
With this chief was his son, a fine, quiet fellow in the costume of the
present generation of Indians, the cowboy suit.  He had served all
through the war in a Canadian regiment.

At Lethbridge, the next town, there was a real and full Indian
ceremonial.  Before a line of tepees, or Indian lodges, the Prince was
received by the Chiefs of the Blood Tribe of the Blackfeet Nation, and
elected one of them with the name of Mekastro, that is Red Crow.

This name is a redoubtable one in the annals of the Blackfeet.  It has
been held by their most famous chieftains and has been handed down from
generation to generation.  It was a Chief Red Crow who signed the
Wolseley Treaty in '77.  Upon his election the Prince was presented
with an historic headdress of feathers and horns, a beautiful thing
that had been worn by the great fighting leaders of the race.

There were gathered about the Prince in front of these tall, painted
tepees many chiefs of strange, odd-sounding names.  One of these
immobile and aquiline men was Chief Shot on Both Sides, another Chief
Weasel Fat, another Chief One Spot, another Chief Many White Horses.
They had a dignity and an unyielding calm, and if some of them wore
befeathered bowler hats, instead of the sunray feathered headdress, it
did not detract from their high austerity.  Chief One Spot--"he whose
voice can be heard three miles"--was a splendid and upright old warrior
of eighty; he had not only been present at the historic treaty of '77,
but had been one of the signatories.

The Prince chatted with these chiefs, while the Lethbridge people, who
had shown extraordinary heartiness since the public welcome in the
chief square of the town, crowded close around.  While he was talking,
the Prince asked if he could be shown the interior of one of the
wigwams, and his brother, Chief Weasel Fat, took him to his own, over
the door of which was painted rudely the emblem of the bald-headed
eagle.

The wigwam is a fine airy home.  Its canvas walls are supported by
tall, leaning poles bound at the top.  There is no need of a centre
pole, and a wood fire burning on a circular hearth sent up a coil of
smoke through the opening at the top of the poles.

The floor was strewn with bright soft rugs, on which squaws in vivid
red robes were sitting, listening to all that was said with impassive
faces.  The walls were decorated with strips of warm cloth upon which
had been sewn Indian figures and animals.  The wide floor space also
held a rattanwork bed, musical instruments and the like; certainly it
was a more comfortable and commodious place than its bell-tent shape
would suggest.

Leaving the exhibition grounds, on which the encampment stood, the
Prince passed under an arch made of Indian clothes of white antelope
skin, beads and feathers, and after reviewing the war veterans, went to
the town ball that had been arranged in his honour.

Lethbridge is a mixture of the plain and the pit.  It is a great grain
centre, and there is no mistaking its prairie air, yet superimposed
upon this is the atmosphere of, say, a Lancashire or Yorkshire mining
town.  Coal and other mines touch with a sense of dark industrial
bustle the easy air of the plain town.  It is a Labour town, and a
force in Labour politics.  That, of course, made not the slightest
difference to its welcome; indeed, perhaps it tinged that greeting with
a touch of independent heartiness that made it notable.

As a town it impresses with its vividity at once.  That, indeed, is the
quality of most Canadian cities.  They capture one with their air of
modernity and vivacity at first impact.  True, one sometimes finds that
the town that seemed great and bustling dwindles after a few fine
streets into suburbs of dirt roadways, but one has been impressed.  It
may be very good window dressing, though, on the other hand, it is
probably good planning which concentrates all the activity and
interests of the town in the decisively main avenues.

II

Friday, October 3rd, saw the Prince visiting a string of three towns.

Medicine Hat was the first of these, an attractive, park-like place
full of "pep."  Medicine Hat's claim to fame beyond its name lies in
the fact that, having discovered that it was sitting upon a vast
subterranean reservoir of natural gas, it promptly harnessed it to its
own use.  Now, that elemental thing is in the control of humanity, and
heats the town, and tamely drives the wheels of industry.

The outstanding ceremony was the way little boys suddenly took fright
on a roof.  In the middle of the town, beside the street, is a tall,
thin standpipe, and this standpipe was to demonstrate a "shoot off" of
the gas.  Scores of small boys climbed on to the roofs of neighbouring
sheds to see the fun.  First there was a meek, submissive flame burning
at the top of the pipe, and looking weak in the fine sunlight.  Then,
abruptly, the flame shot up a hundred feet, and there was a loud
roaring.  Not only was the roaring a terrifying thing, but the force of
that rush of gas made the ground, the roof and the little boys tremble.
Little boys came off that roof in record time, and with such a clatter
that the effort of the standpipe almost lost its place as a star turn.
This tremendous pressure is not habitual; it is, I believe, obtained by
bursting a charge in one of the gas wells.

The Prince also saw the uses to which the gas was put in a big pottery
mill.  The kilns here were an incandescent mass of fire, the work of
the easily controlled gas that does the work with a tithe of the labour
and at a mere fraction of the cost necessitated by ordinary baking
kilns.

Maple Creek and Swift Current were stepping-off places, with all their
populations packed in the square about the station to give the Prince a
hearty greeting.  At Maple Creek the pretty daughters of the township
were very much in evidence, and held His Royal Highness up with
autograph albums.

Moose Jaw, one of the few towns where a quaint name is traceable, for
it is the creek where the white man mended the cart with a moose
jaw-bone, which the Prince reached on the morning of October 4th, is a
bigger town and proud of its position as a grain, food and machinery
distributing centre for Southern Saskatchewan.  In its station
courtyard it had built up an admirable exhibit of its vegetables and
fruit, its sides of bacon, its grain in ear, its porridge oats in
packets, and its butter and cream in drums and churns; while chiefest
of all it showed ramparts of some of the two million sacks of flour it
handles annually.  The whole of the exhibit was set in a moat of grain
and potatoes.

The Prince went to the University Grounds, where a mighty crowd
attended the welcoming ceremony, and where a wild and timeless
waltz-quadrille of motors which straggled all-whither over the grounds,
marked the attempts of people to locate and follow him when he drove
away to the hospital and a big packing factory.  At the packing plant
he saw the whole process of handling meat, from the moment when cowboys
in chaps drove the herd to the pens to the final jointing of the steer.

From Moose Jaw he went to Regina, which he reached that afternoon.
Regina is the capital of Saskatchewan, but an accidental capital.
Somewhere about 1880 it was decided to start itself in quite another
place.  Qu'Appelle, where there was a Hudson Bay Fort and the country
was attractive, was the site chosen.  And Qu'Appelle opened its mouth
too wide--or, anyhow so the version of the story I was told goes.  The
land-owners there asked an outside number of million dollars, and the
townplanners went to Pile o' Bones instead.

Pile o' Bones was a point near Wascana Lake where there had been a big
slaughter of buffaloes.  It was a point of no importance, but Canadians
don't mind that sort of thing.  When they make up their minds to build
a city, a city arises.  Regina arose, broad and bustling, a trifle
chilly as becomes a city of the prairie, rather flat and not altogether
attractive, yet purposeful.

It also gained another reason for regard by becoming the headquarters
of the "Mounties," the Royal North-West Mounted Police, whose main
barracks are here.  We saw something of the discipline of that fine
service in the way the big crowds were handled, for the Prince drove
through the streets in the order and state of a London or New York
pageant.

The Parliament Buildings are beautifully situated before a wide stretch
of water.  They are the semi-classical, domed, white stone buildings of
the design of those at Edmonton and other cities--a sort of
standardized parliament building in fact.  Before them, on the terraces
and lawn that shelved down to the water, the big throng made a scene of
quick beauty.  There were ranks of pretty nurses, rank upon rank of
khaki veterans, battalions of boy scouts mainly divorced from hats
which were perpetually aloft on upraised and enthusiastic poles, aisles
of sitting wounded whom the Prince shook hands with, and thick,
supporting masses of civilians.  Lining this throng were unbending
fillets of scarlet statues, the "Mounties" of the guard.  And
humanizing the whole were solid banks of school-children who sang and
cheered at the right as well as the wrong moment.

The presentation of medals--one to a blinded doctor, who, led by a
comrade, received the most poignant storm of cheers I have ever heard
in my life--and a giant public reception finished that day's
ceremonies.  Sunday, October 5th, was a day of rest, and Monday was the
day of the "Mounties."

The Prince showed a particular interest in his visit to the
Headquarters of this splendid and romantic corps.  The Royal North-West
Mounted Police is a classic figure in the history of the Empire.  The
day is now past when the lonely red rider of the wilds stood for the
only token of awe and authority among Indian tribes and "bad men"
camps, but though that may be there are no more useful fellows than
these smart and sturdy men, who, scarlet-coated, and with their
Stetsons at a daring angle, add a dash of colour and bravery to the
streets of Western Canada.

In his inspection the Prince saw the reason why the physique of the men
should be so splendid and their nerve so sure.  The training of the
R.N.W.M.P. makes no appeal to the weakling of spirit or flesh.  He saw
their firm discipline.  He saw them breaking in the bucking bronchos
they had to ride.  He saw them go through exhausting mounted tests.
His congratulations on their wonderful show were expressed with great
warmth.

From Regina the Prince took a holiday.  He went up to the sporting
country near Qu'Appelle for duck and game shooting, spending from
Monday, October 6th, until Friday, October 10th, there.  This district
abounds in duck, and the Prince and his staff had very fair sport.
During his stay the weather suddenly turned colder, the rivers froze
over and snow fell.  So sudden was the cold snap that one of those with
the Prince was caught napping.  He woke up to find that his false teeth
were frozen into the solid block of ice that had been water the night
before.  He had to take the tooth glass to the kitchen of the house
where he was staying, and thaw it before he could even articulate his
emotions adequately.

Riding in a fast car from the scene of the sport to the station gave
the Prince an indication of what winter would be like in the prairies,
where the wind from the north sweeps down unresisted, and with such a
force that it seems to go right through all coats, save the Canadian
winter armour of "coon coat" or fur.

Brandon and Portage la Prairie, two determined little towns, gave the
Prince a snow welcome.  The weather kept neither grown-ups nor children
away from the liveliest of greetings.  They were attractive halts in a
run that took the Prince to Winnipeg.

In Winnipeg we appreciated the virtues of central heating, for the wind
made the whole universe extraordinarily cold.  Up to this I had
considered central heating a stuffy subject, and I am yet not fully
converted, for though there are those who say it can be controlled
quite easily, I have yet to meet the superman who can do it.

All the same, steam heating has its virtues.  On those cold days in
Winnipeg we lived in a world that knew not draughts.  It was almost a
solemn joy to sit in a bath, and to feel that though half of one was in
hot water, the other half was also comfortable and not the prey of
every devilish current of icy air such as sports itself in those damp
refrigerators, the British bathrooms.  Naturally, since we are staying
in a Canadian hotel of the up-to-date kind, a bathroom was attached to
our bedroom as a mere matter of course.  But if we had had to wander
Anglicanly along corridors in search of a bathroom we should still have
been draught free, for central heating deals with corridors, and
stairways, and halls and lounges with one universal gesture.

Not merely in so fine an hotel as the "Royal Alexandra," but in the
private houses and the "apartments" (English--"flats"), central heat
and good bathrooms are items of everyday--though many Canadians burn an
open fire in their sitting-rooms for the comfortable look it gives.

These things are not merely for comfort, but they are, with the
hardwood floors, the mail chutes in "apartment" houses and the rest,
part of the great science of labour-saving, which the whole of America
practises.

One realizes the need of labour-saving when one sees in a theatre
vestibule the following notice:

  "ALL CHILDREN NOT LEFT WITH THE
      MATRON MUST BE PAID FOR"

As nurses are rare, and servants are rare, the Americans have to
organize themselves to simplify the task of housekeeping.

The "apartments" are compact and neat, arranged for easy handling.  The
rents are not cheap.  One very pleasant little "apartment," "hired" by
a newly-married couple, was made up of three rooms, a kitchen and a
balcony.  It was in the suburbs.  The rent was thirty-five dollars a
month, say eighty-four pounds a year, for a flat, which, under the same
conditions (rates included) could be obtained for thirty-five pounds a
year in England in pre-war days.  For this, however, central heating
and perpetual hot water are included.  My friend told me that his
electric light bill came to three dollars a month, and his gas bill
(for cooking) to rather less than that.  In Calgary a friend of mine
had a pretty "apartment" even smaller in a suburban district, was
paying about ninety-six pounds a year over all, _i.e._, rent, light and
gas (central heating being included).  Most of these "apartments" have
an ice house (refrigerator) attached, blocks of ice being left on the
doorstep every morning, just as the milk is left.

Winnipeg is an attractive town to live in.  It has plenty of
amusements, including several good theatres and music halls--fed, of
course, mainly from American sources.  Mrs. Walker, whose husband owns
the Walker Theatre, told me that Laurence Irving and his wife acted on
their stage just before sailing on the ill-fated _Empress of Ireland_.
She went up to his dressing-room to say "Good-bye" to him, the night
before he left, and in answer to her knock he suddenly appeared before
her, dressed in black from head to foot, for the character he was
playing that night.  His appearance filled her with dread--it seemed to
her, as she looked at him, that something terrible was to happen.  Both
Laurence Irving and his wife were, however, in excellent spirits.
Canada treated them royally, and they were going back home full of
optimism, confident that the play that Laurence Irving was then
finishing--one dealing with Napoleon--was to prove the greatest success
of their careers.

We met at Winnipeg, also, a number of the brilliant men and women
journalists whose energy and brains are responsible for the many fine
papers that focus in this city.  We had met such companions of our own
dispensation in other cities, in Ottawa, Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto
and Quebec.  They were not merely keen and accomplished craftsmen, but
their hospitality to us was always of the most delightful generosity.

The Princess visit to Winnipeg was undertaken to give him the
opportunity of saying _au revoir_ to the West.  At the vivid luncheon
he gave in the attractive Alexandra Hotel to all the leaders of the
West, men and women, he insisted that it was _au revoir_, and that so
well had the West treated him, so attractive was its atmosphere, that
he meant not merely to return, but to become something of a rancher
here in the "little place" he had bought in Alberta.  He spoke of the
splendid spirit of the West, and the magnificent future that was the
West's for the grasping, and he left on all those who heard him an
impression of genuine affection for the people and the land with which
his journey had brought him in contact.

He himself left the West a "real scout."  It is a mere truism to say
that his personality had conquered the West, as it had won for him
affection everywhere.  His straightforward masculinity and his entire
lack of side, his cheerfulness and his keenness, his freedom from
"frills," as one man put it, had made him the friend of everybody.  I
heard practically the same expressions of real affection from all
grades, from Chief Justice to car conductors.  I heard, I think, but
one man pooh-pooh, not so much this universal regard for the Prince, as
a universal enthusiasm for something royal.  A labour-leader, who
happened to be present, administered correction:

"That chap's all right," he insisted, and his word carried weight.  "I
saw him in France, and there's not much that is wrong with him.  If
you're as democratic as he is, then you're all right."

The brightest of dances, a game of squash rackets, and the Prince left,
undaunted by the snow, for week-end shooting.  On Tuesday, October
14th, he was in the train again, travelling East, in the direction of
the Cobalt mining country, buoyed up by the prophecy of the local
weather-wise that the cold snap would not endure, but would be followed
by the delightfully keen yet warm weather of the "Indian Summer."  The
local weather-wise were right, but it took time.

CHAPTER XX

SILVER, GOLD AND COMMERCE

Cobalt is a fantasy town.  It is a Rackham
drawing with all its little grey houses
perched up on queer shelves and masses of
greeny-grey rock.  Its streets are whimsical.  They
wander up and down levels, and in and out of houses,
and sometimes they are roads and sometimes they
are stairs.  One glance at them and I began to
repeat, "There was a crooked man, who walked a
crooked mile."  A delightful genius had done the
town to illustrate that rhyme.

And the rope railways that sent a procession of
emotionless buckets across the train when we pulled
in, the greeny-grey lake that presently (inside the
town) ceased being a lake and became a big lake
basin of smooth, greeny-grey mine slime, the vast
greeny-grey mounds of mill refuse, the fantastic
spideriness of the lattice mill workings, and humped
corrugated iron sheds, all of them slightly
greeny-grey in the prevailing fashion--the whole picture
was fantastic; indeed, Cobalt appears a city of gnomes.

We had travelled all Tuesday and Wednesday,
striking east from Winnipeg, only stopping occasionally
for the Prince to return the courtesies of the
CHAPTER XXI

NIAGARA AND THE TOWNS OF WESTERN ONTARIO

The best first impression of Niagara Falls is, I think, the one the
Prince of Wales obtained.

Those who really wish to experience the thrills of grandeur and poetry
of this marvel had better delay their visit until a night in summer,
and make arrangements with the railway time-table to get there
somewhere after dark.  Upon arriving they must hire a car, and drive
down to the splendid boulevard on the Canadian side.  They will then
see the great mass of water under the shine of lights, falling
eternally, eternally presenting a picture of almost cruel beauty.  They
will then know an experience that transcends all other experiences as
well as all attempts at description.

The curious feeling of disappointment which comes to many in daylight
will have been guarded against, and, stimulated by that wondrous first
vision, they will tide over that spiritually barren period which many
know until the marvel of the Falls begins to "grow on them."

The Prince came from Hamilton to Niagara somewhere very close to
midnight on Saturday, the 18th.  He was carried through the dark town
and country to the house of one of the Falls Commissioners.  From here,
through a filigree of trees and leaves, he could look across the
smoking gorge to the Falls on the American side.  Batteries of great
arc lights, focused and hidden cunningly, shone upon the curtain of
white and tumbling waters, and upon the strong, black mass of Goat
Island, that is perched like a diver eternally hesitant on the very
brink of the two-hundred-foot plunge.

The ghostly beauty of the falling water through the light, now a solid
and tremendous curve, now broken into filaments and zigzag whorls, now
veiled by the upward drift of the gossamer spray, held the Prince's
gaze for some time.  But even that beauty was transcended.  He himself
pressed an electric switch, and the grand curve of the Canadian
Horseshoe blazed fully alight for the first time in their history, and
though from this position this could not be fully seen, this new
addition of light gave the whole mass before his eyes an additional
loveliness.

From this point the Prince motored through the town to the splendid
wide promenade that borders the Canadian side of the gorge, and spent
half an hour watching the fascinating play of falling water and spray
in the narrow cauldron of the Horseshoe.

He stood a foot away from the point where the water leaps in its
magnificent and enigmatic curve into the tortured pool below.  Green at
the curve, the water is a mass of curdled white in the strong lights as
it falls.  Beneath, the face of the water is a passionate surface of
whirlpools and eddies and tossing whiteness.  From the tremendous
impact of the drop a column of spray shoots and curls high up in the
air.  It towers quite six hundred feet above the surface of the water,
and it is hard to believe that enduring mass of spray comes from the
fall; in the distance one is convinced that it is steam arising from
some big factory.

On the next day (Sunday) the Prince saw the Falls in their every phase.
He walked up-stream above the Horseshoe to where the Niagara River
jostles down over a series of ledges in the grand and angry Canadian
Rapids, a sight as tumultuous and as thrilling in its own fashion as
the Falls themselves.  He visited the big, white stone power-house to
examine with the greatest interest the machinery that traps the
tremendous latent power of the plunging water, harnesses it, and so
turns the wheels of a thousand industries, and lights hundreds of towns.

Partly walking, partly riding in a car of the scenic tramway, he
followed the line of the Falls and river downward to where the
Whirlpool Rapids curdle and eddy within the deep walls of the gorge.
Over on the American side he saw the castles and keeps of modern
industry: power-houses and factories, springing up from the very rock
of the cliff, and almost forming part of it.  On the Canadian side the
people have not let their utilitarian sense run away with them to such
an extent.  Where America edges the gorge with commercial buildings,
Canada has constructed her beautiful promenade, which continues the
comeliness of the Falls Park through a pretty residential district.
America has Prospect Park and the very beautiful Goat Island Park on
its side, but these are not extended along the gorge.

Below the Whirlpool Rapids the Prince descended to the level of the
river; later, he came to the top of the gorge again, and crossed,
swinging two hundred feet above the water on the spidery ropes of the
aerial railways, the great pool at the end of the river canyon, into
which the pent-up water pushes swirling before turning at right angles
towards Lake Ontario.

The Prince did not go over to the American side, but America came to
him.  The white number-plates of New York State seemed to be everywhere
on automobiles, even outnumbering the yellow of Ontario.  One had the
impression that every American motor-owner within gasolene radius had
decided that he would take his Sunday spin to Niagara Falls, and on to
the Canadian side of the Falls to boot.

American cars were coming over the bridges all day, and American owners
waited cheerfully along the route to get a glimpse of "The Boy," as the
American papers called the Prince.  They joined themselves to the very
friendly crowd of Canadians who gathered everywhere along the route,
and their cheering, mingling with Canadian cheering, showed that
friendliness is not an affair that frontiers can manipulate.

As a matter of fact, the frontier at Niagara is the most imaginary of
lines.  Now that the war is over there is no difficulty in getting to
either side.  And there is no change in atmosphere either.  People and
conditions are much the same, only on the American side our dollars
cost us more.

II

Western Ontario is, in the main, the most British part of Canada.  Its
towns have British names, and the streets of the towns have British
names, while their atmosphere and design are almost of the Home
Counties.  The countryside (if one overlooks the absence of
hedges--though rows of upturned tree-roots with plants growing among
them sometimes have the look of hedges) is the suave, domesticated
countryside of England.  England is in the very air.  And at the first
of these curiously English towns the Prince became an Indian chief.

Brantford, though it reminds one of a comely British country town,
preferably one with a Church influence in it, is really the capital of
the Six Nation Indians.  It actually owes its name to Joseph Brant, the
Mohawk chief, who, having fought his Indians on the side of the
British--as the braves of the fierce and powerful Six Nations had
always fought on the side of the British--in the War of Independence,
marched his tribes from their old camping-grounds in the Mohawk Valley
to this place, so that they could remain under British rule.

The Indians of the Six Nations still live in and about Brantford, for,
though they have ceded away their lands to settlers, they are among the
few of the aboriginal races that have thrived and not decayed under
civilization.  The Prince's visit to Brantford on Monday, October 20th,
was nearly all a visit to the Mohawks, the leaders of the ancient
Indian federation of six tribes.

This is not to say that the welcome given him by Canadians was not a
great one.  As a matter of fact, it was astonishing, and it was
difficult to imagine how a small town like this could pack its streets
with so many people.  But Brantford is industrial and scientific also,
as well as being Indian.  After a strenuous reception, for instance,
the Prince went along to the statue that shrines the town's claim to a
place in the history of science.  This was the memorial to Dr. Bell,
who lived in Brantford and who invented the first telephone in
Brantford.  They will even show you the trees from which the first line
over which the first spoken message sent, was strung.

But the colourful ceremonies of Brantford were those connected with the
Mohawks.  The Prince was taken out to the small, old wooden chapel that
George III. erected for his loyal Mohawk allies.  It is the oldest
Protestant chapel in the Dominion.  On its walls are painted prayers in
Mohawk, and it contains an old register that King Edward had signed in
1861.  The Prince added his own signature to this before going into the
churchyard to see the grave of Joseph Brant.

In the little enclosure before the church were the youngest descendants
of the loyal Joseph Brant: ranks of Mohawk boys in khaki, and small
Mohawk girls in red and grey.  They sang to the Prince in their own
language, a singular guttural tongue rendered with an almost abnormal
stoicism.  The children did not move a muscle of lips or face as they
chanted; it might have been a song rendered by graven images.

In the main square of Brantford the Prince was elected chief of the Six
Nations.  This ceremony was carried out upon a raised and beflagged
platform about which a vast throng of pale-faces gathered.  Becoming a
chief of the Six Nations is no light matter.  It is a thing that must
be discussed in full with all ceremonies and accurate minutes.  The
pow-wow on the platform was rather long.  Chiefs rose up and debated at
leisure in the Iroquois tongue, while the pale-faces in the square, at
first quite patient, began to demand in loud voices:

"We want our Prince.  We want our Prince."

And to be truthful, not merely the pale-faces found the ceremony
lengthy.  Gathered on the platform were a number of Mohawk girls,
delicate and pretty maidens, with the warmth of their race's colour
glowing through the soft texture of their cheeks.  They were there
because they had thrown flowers in the pathway of the Prince.  At first
they were interested in this olden ceremony of their old race.  Then
they began to talk of the wages they were drawing in extremely modern
Canadian stores and factories.  Then they looked at the ceremony again,
at the clothes the Indians wore, at the romance and colour of it, and
they said, one to another:

"Say, why have those guys dressed up like that?  What's it all about,
anyhow?  What's the use of this funny old business?"

The romantic may find some food for thought in this attitude of the
modern Mohawk maid.

In the end, after a debate on the fitness of several names, the Prince,
as president of the pow-wow, gave his vote for "Dawn of Morning," and
became chief with that title.  But apparently he did not become fully
fledged until he had danced a ritual measure.  A brother chief in
bright yellow and a fine gravity, came forward to guide the Prince's
steps, and the Prince, immediately entering into the spirit of the
ceremony, joined with him in shuffling and bowing to and fro across the
platform.  Only after the congratulations from fellow-Mohawks and
palefaces, did he leave the daïs to fight--there is no other word--his
way through the dense and cheerful mass that packed the square almost
to danger-point.

It was a splendid crowd, good-humoured and ardent.  It had cheered
every moment, though, perhaps, it had cheered more strongly at one
moment.  This was when an old Indian woman ran up to the Prince,
crying: "I met your father and your grandfather, and I'm British too."
At her words the Prince had taken the rose from his buttonhole and had
presented it to her.  And that delighted the crowd.

The fine weather of Monday gave way to pitiless rain on the morning of
Tuesday, October 21st.  All the same, the rain did not prevent the
reception at Guelph from being warm and intensely interesting.

Guelph is one of the many comely and thriving towns of West Ontario,
but its chiefest feature is its great Agricultural College that trains
the scientific farmer, not of Ontario and Canada alone, but for many
countries in the Western World.  This college gave the Prince a
captivating welcome.

It has men students, but it has many attractive and bonny girl
students, also, and these helped to distinguish the day, that is, with
a little help from the "movie" men.

The "movie" men who travelled with the train had captured the spectacle
of the Prince's arrival at the station, and had driven off to the
college to be in readiness to "shoot" when His Royal Highness arrived.
They had ten minutes to wait.  Not merely that, they had ten minutes to
wait in the company of a bunch of the prettiest and liveliest girl
students in West Ontario.  "Movie" men are not of the hesitant class.
Somewhere in the first seventy-five seconds they became old friends of
the students who were filling the college windows with so much
attraction.  In one minute and forty-five seconds they had the girls in
training for the Prince's arrival.  They had hummed over the melody of
what they declared was the Prince's favourite opera selection; a girl
at a piano had picked up the tune, while the others practised harder
than diva ever did.

When the Prince arrived the training proved worth while.  He was
saluted from a hundred laughing heads at a score of windows with the
song that had followed him all over Canada.  He drove into the College,
not to the stirring strains of "Oh, Canada," but to the syncopated lilt
of "Johnny's in Town."

The Prince was not altogether out of the youthful gaiety of the scene,
for after the lunch, where the students had scrambled for souvenirs, a
piece of sugar from his coffee cup, a stick of celery from his plate,
even a piece of his pie, he made all these dashing young women gather
about him in the group that was to make the commemorative photo, and a
very jolly, laughing group it was.

And when he was about to leave, and in answer to a massed feminine
chorus, this time chanting:

"We--want--a--holiday."

He called out cheerfully:

"All right.  I'll fix that holiday."  And he did.

IV

The whole of these days were filled with flittings hither and thither
on the Grand Trunk line (the passage of the Prince being smoothly
manipulated by another of Canada's fine railway men, and a genius in
good fellowship, Mr. H. R. Charlton), as the Prince called at the
pretty and vigorous towns on the tongue of Ontario that stretches
between Lake Huron and Lake Erie to the American border.

Stratford, with something of the comely grace of Shakespeare's town in
its avenues of neat homes and fine trees, gave him as warm a reception
as anywhere in Canada on the evening of October 21st.  On Wednesday,
October 22nd, the same hearty welcome was extended by those singularly
English towns, Woodstock and Chatham.

On the afternoon of the same day London gave him a mass welcome mainly
of children in its big central park.  London, Ontario, is an echo of
London, Thames.  It has its Blackfriars and Regent Street, its
Piccadilly and St. James'.  It is industrial and crowded, as the
English London is.  Its public reception to the Prince was remarkable.
It had managed it rather well.  It had stated that all who wished to be
present must apply for tickets of admission.  Thousands did, and they
passed before the Prince in a motley and genial crowd of top hats and
gingham skirts, striped sweaters and satin charmeuse.  But though they
came in thousands, the numbers of ticket-holders were ultimately
exhausted.  When the last one had passed, the Prince looked at his
wrist watch.  There was half an hour to spare before the reception was
due to close.  He told those about him to open the doors of the
building and let the unticketed public in.

From London the Grand Trunk carried us to Windsor on Thursday, October
23rd, where crowds were so dense about the station that they overflowed
on to the engine until one could no longer see it for humanity and
little boys.  From the engine eager sightseers even scrambled along the
tops of the great steel cars until they became veritable grandstands.

Crowds were in the virile streets, and they were not all Canadians
either.  A ferry plies from Windsor to the United States, and America,
which at no time lost an opportunity of coming across the border to see
the Prince, had come across in great numbers.  Canadians there were in
Windsor, thousands of them, but quite a fair volume of the cheering had
a United States timbre.

A city with an electric fervour, Windsor.  That comes not merely from
the towering profile of Detroit's skyscrapers seen across the river,
but from the spirit of Windsor itself.  Detroit is America's
"motoropolis," and from the air of it Windsor will be Canada's
motoropolis of tomorrow.  It is already thrusting its way up to the
first line of industrial cities; it is already a centre for the
manufacture of the ubiquitous Ford car and others, and it is learning
and profiting a lot from its American brother.

The Canadian and American populations are, in a sense, interchangeable.
The United States comes across to work in Windsor, and Windsor goes
across to work in America.  The ferry, not a very bustling ferry, not
such a good ferry, for example, as that which crosses the English
Thames at Woolwich, carries men and women and carts, and, inevitably,
automobiles between the two cities.

Detroit took a great interest in the Prince.  It sent a skirmishing
line of newspapermen up the railway to meet him, and they travelled in
the train with us, and failed, as all pressmen did, to get interviews
with him.  We certainly took an interest in Detroit.  It was not merely
the sense-capturing profile of Detroit, the sky-scrapers that give such
a sense of soaring zest by day, and look like fairy castles hung in the
air at night, but the quick, vivid spirit of the city that intrigued us.

We went across to visit it the next morning, and found it had the
delight of a new sensation.  It is a city with a sparkle.  It is a city
where the automobile is a commonplace, and the horse a thing for pause
and comment.  It contained a hundred points of novelty for us, from the
whiteness of its buildings, the beauty of its domestic architecture,
the up-to-date advertising of its churches, to its policemen on traffic
duty who, on a rostrum and under an umbrella, commanded the traffic
with a sign-board on which was written the laconic commands, "Go" and
"Stop."

And, naturally, we visited the Ford Works.  A place where I found the
efficiency of effort almost frighteningly uncanny.  One of these days
those inhumanly human machines will bridge the faint gulf that
separates them from actual life, then, like Frankenstein's monster,
they will turn upon their creators.

Galt (Friday, October 24th) gave the Prince another great reception;
then, passing through Toronto, he travelled to Kingston, which he
reached on Saturday, October 25th.

Kingston, though it had its beginnings in the old stone fort that
Frontenac built on the margin of Lake Ontario to hold in check the
English settlers in New York and their Iroquois allies, is unmistakably
British.  With its solid stone buildings, its narrow fillet of blue
lake, its stone fortifications on the foreshore, and its rambling
streets, it reminded me of Southampton town, especially before
Southampton's Western Shore was built over.  Its air of being a British
seaport arises from the fact that it is a British port, for it was
actually the arsenal and yard for the naval forces on the Great Lakes
during the war of 1812.

And it also gets its English tone from the Royal Military College which
exists here.  The bravest function of the Prince's visit was in this
college, where he presented colours to the cadets and saw them drill.
The discipline of these boys on parade is worthy of Sandhurst, Woolwich
or West Point, and their physique is equal to, if not better, than any
shown at those places.  It is not exactly a military school, though the
training is military, for though some of the cadets join Imperial or
Canadian forces, and all serve for a time in the Canadian Militia,
practically all the boys join professions or go into commerce after
passing through.

The Prince's reception at the college was fine, but his reception in
the town itself was remarkable.  The Public Park was black with people
at the ceremony of welcome, and though he was down to "kick off" in the
first of the Association League football matches, his kick off was
actually a toss-up.  That was the only way to get the ball moving in
the dense throng that surged between the goal posts.

Kingston, too, gave the Prince the degree of Doctor of Laws.  It is a
proud honour, for Kingston boasts of being one of the oldest
universities in Canada.  But though its tradition is old, its spirit is
modern enough; for its Chancellor is Mr. E. W. Beatty, the President of
the Canadian Pacific Railways.  It was from the Railway
President-Chancellor the Prince received his degree.

CHAPTER XXII

MONTREAL

The Prince had had a brief but lively experience of Montreal earlier in
his tour.  It was but a hint of what was to happen when he returned on
Monday, October 27th.  It was not merely that Montreal as the biggest
and richest city in Canada had set itself the task of winding up the
trip in befitting manner; there was that about the quality of its
entertainment which made it both startling and charming.

Even before the train reached Windsor Station the Prince was receiving
a welcome from all the smaller towns that make up outlying Montreal.
At these places the habitant Frenchmen and women crowded about the
observation platform of the train to cry their friendliness in French,
where English was unknown.  And the friendliness was not all on the
side of the habitants.

"They tole me," said one old habitant in workingman overalls, "they
tole me I could not shake 'is han'.  So I walk t'ro' them, _Oui_.  An'
'e see me.  A' 'e put out 'is 'an', an' 'e laf--so.  I tell you 'e's a
real feller, de kin' that shake han' wis men lak me."

Montreal itself met the Prince in a maze of confetti and snow.
Montreal was showing its essential self by a happy accident.  It was
the Montreal of old France, gay and vivacious and full of colour mated
to the stern stuff of Canada.

It is true there was not very much snow, merely a fleck of it in the
air, that starred the wind-screens of the long line of automobiles that
formed the procession; but Canada and Montreal are not all snow,
either.  It was as though the native spirit of the place was impressing
upon us the feeling that underneath the gaiety we were encountering
there was all the sternness of the pioneers that had made this fine
town the splendid place it is.

There was certainly gaiety in the air on that day.  The Prince drove
out from the station into a city of cheering.  Mighty crowds were about
the station.  Mighty crowds lined the great squares and the long
streets through which he rode, and crowds filled the windows of
sky-climbing stores.  It was an animated crowd.  It expressed itself
with the unaided throat, as well as on whistles and with eerie noises
on striped paper horns.  It used rattles and it used sirens.

And mere noise being not enough, it loosed its confetti.  As the Prince
drove through the narrow canyon of the business streets, confetti was
tossed down from high windows by the bagful.  Streamers of all colours
shot down from buildings and up from the sidewalks, until the snakes of
vivid colour, skimming and uncoiling across the street, made a bright
lattice over flagpole and telephone wire, and, with the bright flutter
of the flags, gave the whole proceedings a vivid and carnival air.

Strips of coloured paper and torn letter headings fluttered down, too,
and in such masses that those who were responsible must have got rid of
them by the shovelful.  Prince and car were very quickly entangled in
fluttering strips and bright streamers, that snapped and fluttered like
the multi-tinted tails of comets behind him as he sped.

There was an air of cheery abandon about this whole-hearted
friendliness.  The crowd was bright and vivacious.  There was laughter
and gaiety everywhere, and when the Prince turned a corner, it lifted
its skirts and with fresh laughter raced across squares and along side
streets in order to get another glimpse of this "real feller."

Bands of students, Frenchmen from Laval in velvet berets, and English
from McGill, made the sidewalks lively.  When they could, they rushed
the cars of the procession and rode in thick masses on the footboards
in order to keep up with the Royal progress.  When policemen drove them
off footboards, they waited for the next car to come along and got on
to the footboards of that.

When the Prince went into the City Hall they tried to take the City
Hall by storm, and succeeded, indeed, in clambering on to all those
places where human beings should not go, and from there they sang to
the vast crowd waiting for the exit of the Prince, choosing any old
tune from "Oh, Canada," in French, to "Johnny's in Town," in polyglot.

It was a great reception, a reception with electricity in it.  A
reception where France added a colour and a charm to Britain and made
it irresistible.

II

And it was only a sample, that reception.

Tuesday, October 28th, as a day, was tremendous.  For the Prince it
began at lunch, but a lunch of great brilliance.  At the handsome Place
Viger Hotel he was again the centre of crowds.  Crowds waited in the
streets, in spite of the greyness, the damp and the cold.  Crowds
filled the lobbies and galleries of the hotel to cheer him as he came.

In the great dining-room was a great crowd, a crowd that seemed to be
growing out of a wilderness of flowers.  There was an amazing profusion
and beauty of flowers all through that room.  And not merely were there
flowers for decoration, but with a graceful touch the Mayor and the
City Fathers, who gave that lunch, had set a perfect carnation at the
plate of every guest as a favour for his buttonhole.

The gathering was as vivid as its setting.  Gallic beards wagged
amiably in answer to clean-shaven British lips.  The soutane and
amethyst cross sat next the Anglican apron and gaiters, and the khaki
of two tongues had war experiences on one front translated by an
interpreter.

It was an eager gathering that crowded forward from angles of the room
or stood up on its seats in order to catch every word the Prince
uttered, and it could not cheer warmly enough when he spoke with real
feeling of the mutual respect that was the basis of the real
understanding between the French-speaking and the English-speaking
sections of the Canadian nation.

The reality of that mutual respect was borne out by the throngs that
gathered in the streets when the Prince left the hotel.  It was through
a mere alley in humanity that his car drove to La Fontaine Park, and at
the park there was an astonishing gathering.

In the centre of the grass were several thousand veteran soldiers who
had served in the war.  They were of all arms, from Highlanders to
Flying Men, and, ranked in battalions behind their laurel-wreathed
standards, they made a magnificent showing.  Masses of wounded soldiers
in automobiles filled one side of the great square, humanity of both
sexes overflowed the other three sides.  Ordinary methods of control
were hopeless.  The throng of people simply submerged all signs of
authority and invaded the parade ground until on half of it it was
impossible to distinguish khaki in ranks from men and women and
children sightseers in chaos.