Date Due

m^\ gm

Ttwr

"• - -

fin TAf Mil

>^

WPjri2no7

Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive

in 2009 with funding from

Ontario Council of University Libraries

http://www.archive.org/details/motortourthroughOOwilb

A MOTOR TOUR THROUGH CANADA

THE BIG TIMHEKS HAVE GRUDGES AGAINST MEN AND TURN THEM INTO GNOMES

A MOTOR TOUR THROUGH CANADA

By THOMAS W. WILBY

WITH 31 ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

LONDON : JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD NEW YORK : JOHN LANE COMPANY TORONTO : BELL & COCKBURN. MCMXIV

FC 74 V56 1914

SCOTT

WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLBS

TO THE COMPANION

OP

UNFORGETTABLE MOTOR JOURNEYINGS THROUGH AMERICAN DESERT AND WILDERNESS

MY WIFE

INTRODUCTION

MAETERLINCK'S essay upon riding in a motor-car is a delightful proof that mechanical inventions do not destroy adventure and romance. But the tonneau is no place for a philosopher bent on abstract mental speculations, or indeed for anything else, should there happen to be no road.

When I set out to see Canada from the Tonneau, by motoring from Halifax to Victoria, I had grave doubts of ever being able to make my destination. People declared that there was no continuous road across the country, and that the broken chain of highways which was to be my medium of progression had so much of the element of chance and vagueness and uncertainty, so much of the promise of adventure and endemic primitiveness, that I should be compelled to include it also in my " discoveries."

Canada, it was naively suggested, might best be seen by suspending my machine from a balloon ^ and turning it into a kind of amphibious creature, which at times could crawl on the earth and at others fly in the air or swim in the lakes and rivers.

A study of the map, however, brought me a certain measure of comfort. The choice of route

vHi INTRODUCTION

, was simplicity itself. There was only one way * across. I could motor from Halifax to St. John, N.B., then steer due north for the St. Lawrence at Riviere du Loup, and follow that stately stream to Quebec, Montreal, and Ottawa. Continuing westward, my route would bring me to North Bay and Sudbury in Ontario, and thence in a north-westerly direction by the shores of Lake Superior to Port Arthur. By following the line of the Canadian-Pacific Railway, 1 should eventually reach "Winnipeg vid Kenora, on the northern shores of the Lake of the Woods, and I could then continue my journey across the prairies in a more or less direct line to the Crow's Nest Pass, at the entrance of the Rockies, by way of Brandon, Regina, Moose Jaw, Medicine Hat, Lethbridge, and Macleod.

After that, all that was necessary was to inquire my way to Vancouver of the first man I met !

This plan successfully carried out, I might modestly claim the possible distinction of being the first rash spirit to cross Canada by motor-car, " the first to penetrate the eternal Rockies, the first to break away from the sacred precedent of coolly and superciliously passing an entire country in critical review from the luxurious chair of a railroad observation car.

But Canadians asked me quizzically how I in- tended to get past Lake Superior. The southern shore was American territory, the northern shore a wilderness with only one or two straggling railway settlements. All around and beyond was a path- less region of forest, rock and swamp (muskeg). Far to the north of the lake was the great Clay

INTRODUCTION ix

Belt, a timbered, unsettled, and roadless territory- bounded by the forbidding waters of Hudson Bay and threaded only by the unfinished Grand Trunk Railway.

Superior, the lake of legend and mystery, edging the immutable wilderness, had defied almost all human invasion of her northern shore, ever since the White Man had dispossessed the Red. The canoe, the steamship, the railroad — these had been the sole instruments to men's hands by which to reach the Empire of the Setting Sun. But still the East and West were as far asunder as the Poles, still the wilderness made a mockery of the country's boasted unity and formed a fatal weakness in her political and \/ social evolution.

What an impression of remoteness, of " lost- ness " and " neverness " that separation of East and West conveyed !

Then the Rockies ! How, they asked, was I going to surmount them } No wheeled vehicle had successfully challenged from the road or trail the wall of granite and the eternal snows which I should encounter on leaving the level of the western plains.

When all these Canadian motor-travel con- ditions had been duly reviewed, it was clear that touring in Canada was in its infancy ; that Canadians knew very little about their country from the road. Canada, indeed, was apparently a unit only by the good-natured tolerance of the railroad, having none of that true cohesion of human agglomeration which the existence of a ,/ network of continuous and perfected highways

a 2

X INTRODUCTION

alone can impart. East and West were brought precariously together at their inner borders by an intervening No-Man's Land for which nobody had much use — by a barren waste where Canada's pulsating heart should be.

But Canada was new to me — an unopened book which, owing to my familiarity with the United States, combined with the charm of novelty the force of contrast. The anticipated discomforts were more than outweighed by the certain expectation of the Lure of the Open amid unfamiliar things and the play of spiritual laws and forces in the making of a people with whom I claimed kinship.

It must be confessed that on the Canadian road the car is not yet a welcome dictator. It has not yet transformed the life of the country- side nor shown potency to change regions primitive and somnolent into things cosmopolitan and wide- awake. It has not yet transformed the village blacksmith's into a garage and repair shop, nor turned the rural grocery store into a motor-fuel emporium. It has not made over the ingenuous country inn or small, comfortless hotel, putting a model bath-room and an ideal sanitary bedroom here, and a neat, willing waitress and an exemplary meal there. Instead, the lesser caravanserai is often obtrusively dominated by the untidy loafer, the badly cooked meal and the indifferent service upstairs and down, the ill-lighted, cheerless entrance, the crowded, rusty stove with its shift- less, human types, the rough and tumble writing- desk, and the undue prominence of uncouth elements, compared with which the pleasures of

INTRODUCTION xi

the camp fire would be infinitely preferable to the tourist of sorts.

The Canadian road, too, is still generally uncharted and unsignposted — negative conditions suggesting that the touring automobile continues to rank in some quarters as one of those infernal " contraptions " imbued with the spirit of the seven devils of perversity which must be stolidly endured but cordially ignored. In one province the rule of the road is to the right, in another to the left, and there is no talk of bringing about uniformity.

For the greater part of his trans-continental journeyings, the motorist will find himself on roads innocent of fellow-tourists, and deserted of automobilists except farmers, commercial travellers, and small tradesmen, who have accepted the motor-car as an every-day necessity. But he will be welcome wherever he goes, and be he a true motorist, he will find the battering ordeal of every kind of road more than compensated by the fascination of annihilating illimitable spaces of a vast continent. Here touring takes on that larger significance arising from the ability to motor in one direction for thousands of miles through a country possessing a common language, matchless scenery and immunity from customs boundaries and offering a study of ever-changing living conditions and habits.

It has become a habit of mind both with the Canadian and the foreigner to regard Canadian roads as bad as public interest in them is in- different. That generalisations of this kind may often prove an injustice, a tour of forty-two

v/

xii INTRODUCTION

hundred miles across Canada without any serious mishap should sufficiently demonstrate. Under- taken primarily with the object of seeing as much of Canada from the tonneau as could be com- pressed into the limited space of about two months, it is hoped that the rough notes of the tour here set down will not only aid intending motorists in making their plans for touring Canada, but will be instrumental in calling public attention to the great need of Canada to-day — a Trans-Canadian Highway. Once completed, this will link the con- fusing trails of the pathfinder and the pioneer in the centre of the country with the excellent scenic roads of the Maritime Provinces on the one hand, and the routes threading the lake and river valleys of British Columbia on the other. But it will do more. It will stimulate good road building throughout the country by the mere force of example. It will form, too, a highway not only of vital importance to Canada, but to the whole of the British Empire.

The task of building this perfect highway is a great, a stupendous one. It will be the longest unbroken road in the world. It will literally transform a country whose territorial extent is a series of thinly populated empires. But Canada, young, virile, prosperous, rising steadfastly and confidently to her not distant zenith, will not fail, I believe, to initiate a sound policy of Governmental supervision of this great trunk road from east to west.

That I ultimately succeeded in reaching my destination at Victoria with the minimum of dis- comfort is due in a great measure to the voluntary

INTRODUCTION xiii

assistance of which I was the fortunate recipient from one end of Canada to the other. My thanks are especially due to the Mayors who entrusted me with messages of greeting to British Columbia ; to the Motor Clubs and Boards of Trade which escorted or entertained me and furnished me with pilots ; to the pilots themselves for their cheer- ful sacrifice of time and comfort ; to the ladies, wives of officials, who graciously came forward to decorate my car with pennants ; to the Canadian Press, the Canadian Highway Association and the Dominion Immigration Bureau at Ottawa ; also to the British Columbia Government officials for invaluable support and guidance through the mountains ; to the Progress Club at Vancouver ; and to my kindly host at Victoria, Mr. A. E. Todd.

CONTENTS

Chapter I Chapter II Chapter III Chapter IV Chapter V Chapter VI Chapter VII Chapter VIII Chapter IX Chapter X Chapter XI Chapter XII Chapter XIII Chapter XIV Chapter XV Chapter XVI Chapter XVII

PAGE I

I I

29

54 (>1 88 104 120 13s '53 173

195

209

230 250 270 279

Index

285

ILLUSTRATIONS

TO FACE PAGE

The big Timbers have grudges against men and turn

them into gnomes Frontispiece

*' They all fall asleep when the Monckton bore comes

along" 24

There was an unending chain of settlements and little

white churches ....... 4.6

Sometimes the kitchen had revolted and escaped into

the road ••...... 64

These level unprotected railway crossings form an intoler- able curse and menace ...... 80

The quaint double-decked barns 86

Ottawa has tremendous standards to live up to . . 96

Her spirit was broken at last : she admitted defeat . u8

Bad (Ontario) . . . . . , ^ .136

Good (Alberta) j -5

The trails leap straight as an arrow across the illimitable

prairies ,^2

A herd of buffalo might stampede along the entire length

of a prairie town main street without doing any harm 1 66

We reached the smooth tree-lined earth-roads near

Qu'appelle ,82

When the wind struck Regina i g .

At Indian Head there rose the mysterious bulk of grain

elevators with the solemnity of pyramids . . 186

xviii ILLUSTRATIONS

TO FACE PAGE

" I counted ten miles from that last school-house "

A farm and an alkali slough annihilated all the wheelruts. and navigation commenced ....

Homesteaders trekking .....

The threshers vomited mountains of chaff with a nobl scorn ........

Then man set the golden waste on fire

No road but the broken prairie. Homesteader's house in the distance ......

Trails of the buffalo ......

The road took a thorough dislike to us — we were buried to the hubs in the slough ....

Muscles were tense, ready for a leap to a precarious safety

The Thompson was created for soaring poets and tempera mental dramatists .....

We motored through the lordly ranches

" There's nothing better for me than this old Cariboo road, and I'll live and die on it" .

One stopped shuddering for fear of precipitating the sand slides into the Eraser ....

Architecturally, Lytton refused to be a town

The Yale road — one of the roads of Empire — was fast going to the dogs !.....

We travelled through a royal preserve of Douglas firs

The crags made things unpleasant for the road along Cameron Lake ......

A bull terrier, fierce and aggressive of disposition, was chained to the historic post ....

The Mayor of Victoria and Aldermen came to meet us along the Malahat Drive ....

A MOTOR TOUR THROUGH CANADA

CHAPTER I

IT was on a chilly August night in 19 12 that I reached Halifax by rail for the start of my long motor tour. The little feet of the rain pattered upon the roof of the noisy street car which bore me citywards. People at my side talked dolefully about the deluge which for six long weeks had mercilessly fallen upon the city, and indeed upon the whole of the Maritime Provinces, and made the roads " frights." They wondered what had become of the summer, wondered what had come over Canada. They said they had seen that kind of weather in London, but with the air of people who were convinced that what might be good enough for the metropolis of the world was by no means good enough for Canada.

The tramcar " dropped " me in a huge pool at the foot of a steep pitch leading to the hotel at the summit, while a motor-car slid partly sideways down the hill, showering spindrift and hissing as it approached the crossing of the streets.

In the hotel a uniformed " boy," catching sight of the drenched " arrival," used the smooth, inlaid stone pavement as a slide by which to shoot up beside me, forcibly seized my suit-case as though

I B

2 A MOTOR TOUR

convinced it was his long-lost property, and led me to the reception desk. Gravely sucking a tooth-pick, the clerk without much ado made me sign my name in a register turning on a swivel frame and bristling with advertisements, toothpicks, and matches. Then he thrust into my hand a microscopic key attached to a heavy, Gargantuan ring. The boy hurried me into the lift, shot me up a couple of floors, rushed me down a corridor and into a bedroom, containing little more than a shiny brass bed, a black telephone, a white sink, and a rigid, brown looking-glass at a distressing distance from the light, real or artificial, and then exclaimed with a hard, mechanical abruptness :

*' Ice Water ? "

The offer of the shivering stuff having been refused with true British indifference, the youth banged down the suit-case and banged himself out into the corridor.

The spacious hotel lobby to which I presently descended was a man's world of tobacco smoke and loungers. If you had taken a huge shop with plate-glass windows, removed the ordinary fittings of commerce, substituted a tesselated pave- ment, wooden armchairs, gigantic brass spittoons, a small counter at the side for a tobacconist's and newspaper stand, a bench or two, and a second small counter at the back for the reception clerk, filled up the rest of the space and every available corner, in the way and out of the way, with more spittoons of a shiny-brass, generously-proportioned nature, varied by long rows of steam radiators that did their best to raise the temperature to the sweltering conditions of a Turkish bath in August,

THROUGH CANADA 3

and then, after all that was done, made a careful collection of the smart, bright-looking commercial and non-commercial travellers in the neighbour- hood and planted them in all kinds of lounging attitudes in those chairs, you would have had that hotel lobby to the life. It appeared to be a general rendezvous from which woman had con- spicuously absented herself because of smoke, spittoon, and the all-pervading, monopolising masculinity which had forgotten its best manners. Brute man, indeed, was in formidable array — up the aisle on one side and then down the middle, in a long row in front of the plate-glass windows, by the door, and outside under the overhang of the upper storey. One or two women patrons of the hotel came in unnoticed at the specially- provided " ladies' entrance," looked momentarily at the lounging, smoke-enveloped males, and then disappeared up the extra stairway as if mounting into a seraglio.

A brisk wind blew out of a radiant sky the following morning. The start had been set for the noon hour. There was to be a little formal send-off by the Mayor and the presentation of a flag and a message for conveyance to the far-off coast of the Pacific. But I looked in vain for my car, finding only the chauffeur. He was a young expert driver, very much like those whom 1 had seen in the States — sturdy, independent, self-con- tained fellows, with the sense of relationship to their fellow-men hopelessly confused by their own free interpretation of democracy and equality. The news that he brought me concerning the car was of the worst. The railway authorities, to

4 A MOTOR TOUR

whom it had been consigned twelve days before, had failed to deliver it

As the day wore on and the next came round, the conviction grew that the car was hopelessly lost on the line. The railroad officials could not "locate" the consignment. Possibly some- thing was wrong — that much they would admit — but not with the "system." The "system" was unimpeachable.

1 was ready to admit anything if only they would give me my car. When I had grown to be a nuisance, the railway officials took pity upon me. They straightway looked up way-bills and time sheets, they unhooked telephone receivers, they swore at the yard-men, and they even figured out things on paper. There was a profound air of self-sacrifice about them as they made the most careful mathematical calculations. Then they informed me that the car had passed Montreal some days before.

A few hours later, they said the car had passed Quebec. It was wonderful, that power of pre- vision which they had suddenly developed. At last they assured me with calm confidence that the car had passed Moncton, only a hundred odd miles to the north, some hours before, and that it would be in the yard any moment.

Then came chaos ! The wretched automobile became a phantom of elusive indefiniteness. Sometimes it was in the yard, and sometimes six hundred miles further back along the " system." The " system " swallowed it, and then it humanely disgorged it. Then the car took to loitering, and to hiding, and to stopping

THROUGH CANADA 5

altogether ; next it would come into sight, and I was ready to shake the greasy paw of the train- man and the inky one of the grinning clerk who had arranged things to my satisfaction, and even to write out a testimonial to the " system " that had held up two thousand miles of its precious self for my personal benefit. But at the critical moment there would come sickening disillusion- ment. The box-car containing my treasure would reveal a load of molasses or apples or baby carriages — anything, in fact, but what the way-bill declared it to contain.

System ! Nothing wrong with that. Some one had merely tampered with it, and mixed up things, very much as mischievous-minded people might tamper with the boots and shoes outside the bedroom doors of EnMish hotels so as to confuse ownership. Nothing could be wrong with it !

At last there came an official who hurried me off to the train-yard, pulled down the telephone receiver in violent haste, and called up the " system " in order to " call it down."

"Now then, that car, d'ye hear } The gentle- man's waiting. It's got to be in his hands within an hour. Some one's going to be * fired ' if it isn't, and don't you for-GET it ! "

A voice came back. " It's here all right. It's been here hours ! "

" Good ! Have it unloaded at once ! "

« All right ! "

" The invoice is here, and the money's being paid. Never mind about the formalities. I'll take care of them."

6 A MOTOR TOUR

" Very good, sir."

Mutual congratulations. The official refused any thanks. He had done nothing. He hated thanks — they nearly always made him swoon. 1 was "entirely welcome." The bell rang.

" Hello ! "

" Hello ! About that car."

" Yes."

"Box-car's in the middle of the train, and we can't cut it out."

" The devil ! Why can't you } "

" Well, you see, sir, it's Sunday, and Bill and me's the only hands here."

" Get more, and look smart about it."

" Nothing doing ! There won't be anybody around till seven to-morrow morning."

" There won't ! Get busy and hire some hands. Telephone — telegraph — down the line for an engine. Do anything — everything to get that car 1 "

" Sorry, sir, but the yard-foreman's orders is to do nothing without his O.K., and he's not around. It's against the regulations. I'd lose my job 1 "

Mutual groans of despair. Bell rings furiously.

"Hello! Hello!"

" Is that you, sir ? "

*' Yes."

"About that car. Here's Bill — he wants to tell you something."

" Hello ! It's me, sir. What Jim told you about that car's all wrong. It seems there's been a little mix-up. It ain't on No. 72 freight train."

THROUGH CANADA 7

« What isn't ? The number ? "

" No, sir ; the car ! It was on Freight No. 1 7, and that train's had a breakdown somewhere in Quebec province."

" Then where the devil is it now ? What's the number of the train it's been transferred to ? "

" Don't know, sir. No telling ! When it get's here, I reckon it'll get. That's all there is to it ! "

Halifax for the next twenty-four hours was but an indefinite blur somewhere in the back- ground of my thoughts. I stared at the people vaguely. Canadian habits, temperamental and racial peculiarities but dully puzzled me when, ordinarily, they would have aroused an irresistible curiosity — these English voices that were never heard in England, and these Yankee drawls that had never been imported from over the border ; these familiar landmarks in American life every- where evident — the disfiguring telephone poles, the crowded street cars with their clanging bells and noisy, rasping wheels ; the large stores into which humanity surged through a single door for a dozen diflferent departments ; the inartistic, tawdry wooden dwellings that alternated with the more solid houses of brick. At any other time Halifax would have been an absorbing, if topsy- turvy, world. Now life drifted, subservient to a delinquent automobile. Vancouver and Victoria were as far off as the Antipodes !

Sunday, wet, miserably cold, found me seated in the queer old wooden cathedral church of St. Paul's — a diminutive Georgian edifice, the mother

8 A MOTOR TOUR

church of the Church of England in Canada and the Westminster Abbey of the Western Hemisphere.

" Timbered in times when men built strong, With a tower of wood grown gray, The frame of it old, the heart still young, It has stood for many a day."

St. Paul's occupies an unique position in Canadian and Imperial life. The call to prayer within its walls has been answered by the daunt- less men who " builded better than they knew," and who made a British Canada possible, and by thousands on their way to found new homes on the broad lands of the Dominion.

The preacher conducted almost the entire service. He had broken through Tradition. There was no monotonous intoning, and women took the place of surpliced choristers. The effect was not spectacular ; it was trying to ritual, perhaps ; a trifling disappointing. But the hymns went with a swing, the prayers and the scriptural lessons followed suit with due solemnity, and the sermon, on a practical subject, fell into the general uplifting and enthusiastic key. The whole service was inspiriting, disenthralled, a delicate vindication of the disestablished nature of the Anglican Church in Canada, and a pleasant innovation to ears accustomed to the formal lifelessness of the Church of England. Its finale, however, brought with it surprise. The entire congregation rose and sang a verse of the National Anthem as a regular part of the service.

Was there ever such a remarkable attribute to Imperialism as that ? I felt that delicious

THROUGH CANADA 9

crawling of the skin which I suppose is the true patriotic thrill, as the simple, many-throated chorus went home to one at least of its hearers. I do not suppose there was a single person in the congregation who felt himself in touch with the spirit of antiquated verses which sadly need revision, or cared a rap for a tune which is the common property for three different nations. But in this spontaneous tribute to kingship from a free and powerful democracy, there was surely expressed the outward symbol of that oneness of purpose and world-wide community of interests of England and her children which knows no distinction of latitude or clime.

A good many other sentiments were doubtless suggested by the singing of the anthem in that old wooden church. One might have taken a pencil and paper and made a long list of them and then have been compelled to ask the verger for more paper. But the list would have had no intrinsic value. You might strike all the items out one by one and then begin again and still be as far off from finalty as when one makes a list of all the meanings that Shaw or Maeterlinck have supposedly put into a play. You might eliminate every attribute but the one of loyalty and look at it through the microscope of your judgment and say, "There it is — Loyalty [ "

But loyalty to what ? England ? Well, why ? Has anybody ever said that Canadians were about to turn rebels ? Loyalty .? Fiddle- sticks ! If I were a Canadian I do not think that would ever enter my head any more ; because I am an Englishman, I never bother my

lo A MOTOR TOUR

head about loyalty to a Scotchman or an Irishman, or a modern representative of an Angle or Jute, if such a being exists.

But Imperialism and the sentiment of kinship 1 Those are other and bigger and nobler things. Beside them, the catch-word of loyalty seems mere mawkish twaddle. Canada owes loyalty to herself. But she owes love and devotion and gratitude to the great Mother that fought and bled and spent of her treasures that she might found for her children this new Empire for them beyond the seas.

Were I a Haligonian, I think 1 should petition the city to have an electrophone laid under the sea, so that the listening Mother might proudly hear the regular and fervid repetition of those stirring strains from the nearest point on the Canadian shore.

CHAPTER II

A T last, on the 27th of August, the car stood /^L with her rubber feet in the Atlantic

/ ^ ready for her ocean baptism 1 •^ -^- Glittering in her shiny coat ot

black paint, her fore and aft lines as fine as those of a yacht, ship-shape and new, with everything snugly packed out of sight and not an ounce ot superfluous load, she was an ideal tourist car — a guileless thing, apparently unconscious of the long and trying journey before her. " Rough-shod " with anti-skid tyres on all four wheels, her spare " shoes " hanging jauntily behind out of the way with the tyre drum, the polished metal trunk for suit-cases arranged like a table in the tonneau, a single centre lever control for the gears, pedals ^^ for both brakes, two speedometers, a horn worked by foot, two long boxes on the running boards to hold the loose paraphernalia of the outfit, the petrol reserve tanks and oil-can, I knew her for a beauty and forgave her her delay.

A flask was filled with a few precious drops of the ocean, and then, leaping gaily over the stones, the car dashed out of the water and we were off — the Mayor's letter of greeting to the Mayor of Vancouver in my pocket — to transmute into action my idea of reaching the Pacific by road.

ji

y^

12 A MOTOR TOUR

Fully loaded, the machine weighed four thousand pounds. She was a touring car per se, with open body, high clearance, and seating capacity for five. I had purposely omitted camp- ing outfit, and beyond the inclusion of axe and shovel, spares, and block and tackle for hauling her out of bad spots, I had only the customary outfit of the tourist on the American continent who is bent on making the best of any kind of pot-luck along beaten ways.

On the edge of a rolling landscape, some three miles out of Halifax, the spirited little pilot- car pulled up at a dingy wooden inn, painted by Father Time in dull grays. Its duties were over, and, in the manner of the impish tugs which convoy and nose mighty ocean liners out into broad deep channels, it seemed to say that we might now be left to our own devices and — petrol. Somewhere, appropriately lost in the trough of the billowy undulations of land, lay many of the unidentified victims of the " Titanic " disaster. A litter of railroad yards, the flotsam and jetsam of inland shores, and the ragged d3ris of saw- mills made up the opposite landscape, over which leaden clouds raced before the fast oncoming dusk.

Rough-looking men sat in the smoke-laden atmosphere of the inhospitable and comfortless tap-room. They were not tipplers, but they appeared and smelt like lumber-jacks who had never been far from the woods or from bad drinks. The city was still in sight in a detached, straggling way, as an army is often suggested by its advance picket, or a storm by its fleecy skirmishers.

THROUGH CANADA 13

Life seemed to drift here casually, philo- sophically, and the men paid no heed to us as we lingered over a stirrup cup. But the pilot inad- vertently gave the secret away, and one by one the loungers ambled out to the roadside and inspected the car with the same bewildered sapiency that an old salt might display in sniffing at a fresco by Botticelli or a clergyman in examin- ing a boxing-glove once worn by Jem Mace. Vancouver awoke only vague geographical associa- tions. It had no connection with their lives ; it suggested a journey to the moon. They stared at me, blinking behind the smoke wreaths.

For the first few hours the charm of Nova Scotia scenery was less dominant than the feeling of joy at that conscious bounding into infinitude. The physical self almost cowed before the sense of distance. Only a Cassar, a Napoleon, an Alexander looks fearlessly into vast spaces — is big enough of soul to overcome all dread of the Space Bogey. Our common, inherited fear of death — is it not the shrinking before the Infinite with its uncertainties ? We have had enough of one world ; two seem too much, and some of us would prefer that the temporal one should be dwarfed to the known limitations of a Crusoe's island. It would reduce the problem of possession, individual or racial ; it would save us puzzling out a solution of the unknown.

What was I about to discover on this long road to the setting sun ? History has done its best to keep Canada hidden from prying eyes and to hold her back from too swift advancement. It was only a short time ago that Canadians awoke

14 A MOTOR TOUR

and " found " themselves. The world was in- terested. It seemed wonderful and thrilling to read of people who, venturing a few miles from their front doors, might chance upon an unfamiliar river, creek, or hill and have the important find duly registered at Ottawa. There are still, pre- sumably, hundreds of creeks and hills quite unknown, but the ball of discovery, once started, has never ceased to roll.

As we advanced northward the roads became narrow and winding, and rather muddy from weeks of steady rain ; presently they led through dark woods, over clay-gravel paths, and along a straight bit of highway into Stubencadie, where we stopped to light our lamps. Thenceforward, \^ the route had the consistency of a batter pudding, and a good deal of determination and petrol were necessary to force the car through. The surface was sand or loose gravel, but the sub-soil was red clay with an unconscionable amount of water in the ruts, the wheels shooting up the pools into hissing spray and flinging it disgustedly into the brushwood.

A bowing acquaintance with the scenery had not thus far revealed anything unusually attrac- tive. The country emancipated itself but slowly from the thrall of the city. A house might be a farmhouse, but it was often an exact replica of the typical dwelling I had seen in Halifax. The man to whom I spoke on the road might be a farm hand or the farmer himself, but if he had put on a coat and seated himself in a city restaurant to eat, or in a barber's chair to talk politics, it would have taken a sharper eye than mine to distinguish

THROUGH CANADA 15

him from the average citizen. What would have stood for two extremes in Europe, were here one and the same in only a slightly different setting. The countryman, in fact, was merely a citizen in disguise. There was no village, but rather a bit of town that had become mysteriously detached and had lost its way on a deserted highway, flanked by fields and fenced by trunks of young timber or split logs. The little towns might all have been chips off some part of Halifax. Each had its hotel with a " shop window " of the lobby cleared for smokers whose feet reposed dizzily aloft on a brass bar. Each had its grocer and baker and candlestick-maker cut exactly according to the pattern that I had watched for four days at the water's edge, facing England. Rusticity was obviously taboo.

Truro, the night's destination, was reached shortly before ten o'clock. The dining-room of the hotel had gone out of business till morning, and there was nothing to do but to beat a hasty retreat to the railroad buffet, where some excellent sandwiches were unearthed and washed down by a deadly concoction of stewed hay, that masqueraded under the name of tea.

Mr. C , a Truro motorist, asked what

time I was "pulling out" In the morning.

" Oh ! " I said eagerly, for the fever of the tour was already burning in my veins, "about seven."

Mr. C 's face fell. " Hum — m ! Too

bad ! We'd thought of giving you a send-off by ringing the town fire-bell. But the citizens would never turn out at that hour."

/

1 6 A MOTOR TOUR

However, in spite of my new friend's know- ledge of Truro, somnolent and awake, a good many guests of the hotel were about when I came down next morning for the early start. Most of them were young, smart-looking com- mercial travellers, or " drummers," as they are usually styled. The hotel appeared to be built especially for their convenience. A large room, with trestle tables, was reserved for their use and labelled "sample room." Near the proprietor's desk was a special corner for the commercial travellers' baggage, left there overnight with the same degree of confiding faith in human nature displayed by the European who leaves his boots outside his bedroom door on retiring. On the wall over the baggage were labels, one marked " For trains going East," and another " For trains going West."

While I was contemplating this methodical assortment of suit- cases and bags, the front door flew open and a stentorian voice bawled in measured accents, " All aboard for Number Thirteen, train going East 1 "

Thereupon an unwonted activity suddenly manifested itself among the hotel occupants. Footsteps rattled on the staircase, the smokers lolling in the armchairs flung their cigar-stumps at the accommodating stove and started up, and the door from the dining-room swung rapidly to and fro. From all sides men made dives for the luggage under the labels and disappeared hurriedly into the street.

A ruddy-faced, clean-cut English fellow, bearing unmistakable evidences of the Trans-

THROUGH CANADA 17

Atlantic liner steward, was cleaning the hotel brasswork, while two charwomen industriously scrubbed the floors. Some rearrangement of my personal baggage being rendered necessary by the hasty start of the day before, the man made him- self useful by fetching it and rigging up a table in the *' sample room " on which to spread it out. He opened the suit-cases, sorted the contents, gave them professional scrutiny, repacked them, and, generally speaking, performed good valet work. His voice was manly, but soft. He said " sir " in the deferential English manner, with the inimitable rinof of " oblimngness." If he had said " Damn," the deference and desire to please would have been just as obvious and agreeable.

Unbidden, he placed my things on the car, arranging them faultlessly and skilfully. The voluntary service marked him as a raw recruit in this country where everybody apparently finds it more convenient to help himself. I wondered how soon he would drop the obliging manner as reminiscent of inferiority ; how long it would be before his vocabulary changed for the worse, the pleasing voice lost its English softness, and he emerged from his chrysalis an independent, self- reliant individual. May some good Providence prevent me from meeting him then 1 He will have lost the magnetism that now draws me to his honest, unconscious simplicity. Something will have departed from him, that brought to me a message from the little country which " holds the title-deeds of the British race."

Perhaps, however, he will have had time to accomplish an unsuspected purpose. Nothing is

i8 A MOTOR TOUR

ever destroyed. Little bits of him — his deferen- tial manner and ready service — will be scattered without his knowledge wherever he has been in Canada. That pleasant, well-modulated English voice has to be reckoned with. Like seed before the wind its influence will permeate Canadian life, ripening here and there, and flowering into graciousness. On his march westward — he will not stay in Truro — some bright-eyed daughter of John Canuck will hear that voice and try to imitate it. A lumberman in the woods will catch the unwonted accent and feel less attuned to the roughness of the wild. It will innoculate a farmer or a cowboy. In the far-ofl^ valleys of the Columbian fastnesses, where the Chinook winds blow and the avalanches fall, some exile from the Mother Country will hear that voice and pause, and invite the man in. And some few will learn from his smile and manner that Life is not all struggle and toil and that the humblest may be embellished by grace.

The direction which I now followed was due west along the north shore of the Cobequid Bay, which forms one of the easternmost channels of the Bay of Fundy. The latter, the waters of which had ebbed and left a broad shore-line of reddish-brown sand and mud, had been one of the wonders of my early geography books. Its coasts, I remember, were not inhabited by ordinary mortals, but by the doughty ofl-'spring of Norsemen or great and sublime explorers like Hudson or Columbus. They lived in a remote world, iso- lated from their fellow-men, and were a most extraordinary people, gifted with a tremendous

THROUGH CANADA 19

courage that, unquailing, could look twice daily upon a wave fifty to a hundred feet high, advancing — a mighty phalanx — for hundreds of miles. I never, of course, imagined that any other than the most marvellously intrepid traveller could ever catch a glimpse of this singular race and live to tell the tale. Indeed, the man who had written the geography of Fundy had probably left his story in a hastily improvised cairn beside his dead body.

Yet here was the Bay of Fundy at last, a thing of unexpected beauty. No more mystery ; no strange and impossible people ; but sunlit vales, lovely woods, and beautiful, peaceful villages set amid orchards, white-steepled churches and towering barns, and traversed by red gravel and clay roads. A simple, everyday girl was drawing water from a modern well ; an ordinary boy was eating live snails ; a bearded farmer sat in a buggy ; an itinerant butcher hawked his wares from a queer, closed wagon, while a long- headed and long-legged farm-hand squatted on a split-log fence.

In the midst of all this disenchantment lay the wonder of wonders — that deep Bay whose waters, rushing in from the sea as if to cleave a way through the narrow peninsula to the Atlantic again, are filling up and emptying rivers, till they resemble water in a gauge, and are depositing a rich mud that one day must transform the Bay into a broad, fertile land.

What a picture for an artist ! Here were the easy outline of mountain, the wide placidity of water, the red-sailed ship, the schooner beached ia

20 A MOTOR TOUR

the mire, and overhead the white puffy clouds of the typical sketch-book. And then the colour 1 One's fingers twitched to daub a canvas with lapis lazuli waters, indigo hills, purple sands, green weirs, seaweed-tinted rocks, and the tawny red mud, shiny pink in the middle distance, and dull heliotrope in the offing. Was it not by shores like these that the Indians always scratched their pictures on the rocks ^

The ocean waters flowed down a narrow trough between the great mud-banks. Beyond the low mountains of Cobequid Bay lay the lofty shores of Minas Basin. Opposite loomed up Cape Blomidon — a gigantic hook of land jutting out as if to arrest the waters in their sweep inland. Further yet lay Longfellow's Evangeline country centering in the village of Grand Pre. A calmer, lovelier scene was scarcely conceivable. My eyes came back to the narrow trough of trickling water — all that was left in that sea of mud by the ebbing tide.

" Heavens ! " I involuntarily exclaimed. " If somebody doesn't quickly put the plug back in that old bath-tub, there won't be a drop of water left ! "

Ships lay at all angles in the fathomless batter, canted high and not too dry, as if landed there on the crest of some seismic wave. It must be a rare experience to watch the magical change when the sea comes back again, and the blue waters swallow up the red earth once more — to see the ships quiver and waver and rear themselves out of the mire, to float asfain in a sur^inor flood.

The bewitching panorama of Minas Basin

THROUGH CANADA 21

with its wooded Five Islands came to an end at the little town of Parrsborough. On the broad main street, in a small pastry shop, I unearthed a sandwich, a glass of " orange beer " drawn from a keg, and a few cakes. The woman who served me was apparently a new settler washed into this eddy of the Bay from the great main Fundy of emigration. Sheets stretched on cords, gave an air of aristocratic exclusiveness to a couple of refreshment tables. It was rather a dreary and hopeless scene — hardly the golden Paradise the emigrant expects of the New World.

One of the drawbacks of travel is that one is for ever leaving delightful spots where he would be perfectly content to linger. Thus, it was difficult to turn inland from Parrsboro' and to take farewell of the shining blue waters and distant Blomidon. From the wooded heights above the Bay I could see the opposite shores, which had been the haunts of the legendary Hiawatha of Fundy, the great Glooscap, the doughty giant who had been famous for his kettle, his wailing loons, his little vest-pocket dogs that increased to gigantic proportions when- ever he needed their services, and his stone moose swimming across the Bay. Glooscap had guarded the jewelled Blomidon, from which had been taken the precious stones that, placed within the diadem of France, had wrought the undoing of Marie Antoinette 1 And Glooscap it was who, when the Great Beaver had sought to dam the Bay between Blomidon and Parrsboro', and flood the world around it, had valiantly fought with and slain it, while with Herculean strength he

22 A MOTOR TOUR

had turned the dam back upon the southern shores.

Beyond Parrsboro' the roads grew bumpy, and mean, ugly stretches alternated with occasional

J levels as smooth as a Shrove-Tuesday pancake. The wind rose and played about the maple and elm tops in a majestic, overhead diapason all the way to Amherst. Such a charming country it was, rolling and swelling into earth crests, dotted with villages or farms, or with little white steepled churches, mightily proud of their trimness, and evidently bent on proving, by their immaculate paint and order, how near Cleanliness may be to Godliness. But if the churches shone, the village homes generally lacked all outward embellishment. Love and care had been expended on the House of God and its tributary graveyard, while the wooden home of man was negligible in its dull, gray tones, its make-shiftness, and its corner supports of rudely piled stones. The little wooden, box-like schools, which stood isolated at the cross-ways, were equally shabby, secular affairs, matching the shabby highways. For here a poor road inevitably meant a shabby farm, a dilapidated school-house, slovenly-dressed children, bad bridges, miserable plank or log culverts across the roadway. A good road, on the other hand, nearly always stood for improved con- ditions, and was generally as potent as magic

'> for moral uplift. Given a good highway, the farmer sets to work to rebuild tumble-down fences, to clean out ditches, to get a new coat

^ and hat, to shave a little oftener, to carry himself straighter, and to take more pride in his house

THROUGH CANADA 23

and wife and horse. Presently he is worrying about the appearance of his farm. For the first time he notices that the old home looks run down and painfully like a shack. Nothing will suit him but to change to better quarters before the year is out. Meantime a brand-new coat of paint won't be amiss, for he is now somewhat ashamed of the home which he had built with his own hands. Everybody in the neighbourhood catches the improvement fever. Neighbours set to work making their collective surroundings better. The school-house is the first thing that comes in for general attention. The church no longer looks so aloof in its spotlessness. In short, the good road has reformed the man, reformed the housewife, transformed the children. It has made better husbands and wives and citizens ; it has cleaned out the stables and the ballot, and changed the ways of living and thinking and dealing ; it has put more money into the farmer's pocket, and more pride of the genuine sort into his heart. It has been a preacher and a lecturer. It has fitted the neighbourhood for citizenship, and paved the way for the world to follow. In a word, it has regenerated the community.

The stop at Amherst was only long enough to enable us to pick up a pilot, as I was anxious to cross the weirdly picturesque Tantramar Marshes into New Brunswick by daylight. To the left were the waters of Cumberland Basin with the peninsula of Joggins jutting far out into it. Suddenly, as it seemed, we were on that narrow neck of land where the waters of Fundy have succeeded in boring their way so far to the

24 A MOTOR TOUR

Atlantic as to give Nova Scotia the appearance of merely hanging on to the mainland by the skin of its teeth. There was a Delft-Hke quality about the sky, things levelled down, and the horizon-line retreated miles across a marsh flanked by distant hills. Sedges grew amid occasional cultivation, but the human touch was not suffi- cient to silence the note of wild solitude. Cut deeply through the scene was the tawny gash of Tantramar's winding bed of slime and sand. One gazed shudderingly but spell-bound at the sight. It was like a page out of the " Ingoldsby Legends," recalling the spooky dusk, the rattling gibbet, the howling wind. Some distance ahead stretched the broad sweep of the Petticodiac River, famous for its " bore " or tidal wave. But the tide was out, and the river lay there, a tawny beast, sluggishly dull and inactive.

Nobody to whom I spoke at Moncton about the " bore " seemed much interested in it. One man said I should find a notice about the time it was due posted up in the other hotel. The " bore " might be the show-thing of the town. In fact, he had once heard something to that effect. But they generally left it to strangers.

The bulletin board in the " other hotel " was deserted, and the spacious entrance was in semi- darkness. A man was asleep in a near-by chair, another was preparing to doze in a distant corner. The notice declared that the Moncton Daily Miracle was due at lo.io o'clock that night, but, apparently true to the character of all bores, it was getting the cold shoulder from those who knew it.

THROUGH CANADA 25

A stiff walk of about a mile brought me to the scene of the aquatic spectacle. There was a "look-out" from which one could get a view of the river bend where the bore approaches the town. There were still twenty minutes to spare before the advertised performance. I sat down.

A stir in the shadows, a rustle, then a chuckle. Could it be the gurgling herald of the great volume of sound as the flood rushes into view from the distant bay ? Could it

A man stood before me — tall, thin, shot up in the pyrotechnic fashion of a beanstalk, with keen eyes and an uncommon resemblance to Haliburton's " Sam Slick the Clockmaker."

" So youVe come to see it } " There was a derisive ring in his voice.

" It ?— the Bore ? "

The man nodded.

"Yes. Ten-ten, I think, it's due."

"You're on time."

" Waiting for it yourself ? "

" I reckon so."

" Visitor ? "

The man shook his head. " No ; native 1 "

" What ? A native ? They told me "

A sudden gesture interrupted me. " I know — 1 know. They all think me cracked because I come here and watch — and watch. But I love bores, have a passion for them, as other men have for home, or horses, or — onions."

"Perhaps they're wanting in imagination." I waved my hand deprecatingly back in the direction of the town.

26 A MOTOR TOUR

" Imagination 1 That's just it. I've got imagination about this thing, else I shouldn't be here. There's been a lot of libel about it, and I'm the only man in the town at present who comes here to see it. Things have changed since that old bore used to make a stir around here by the capers it cut. In those days these big mud flats would cover all the marshes, and a telescope wouldn't discover enough water to float a may-fly for a spring trout's breakfast. You'd see a ship trying to stand on its head in the mud, and the earth getting as dry as a bone for miles around as it dozed in the hot sun. The scene would make you kind of disgusted with the monotony, and you would turn away to go home. And then, before you could say *John Canuck,' the ocean would be back there, and the ships floating and the breeze springing up and the fishermen getting ready to put out after cod and shad, and you would have to skip mighty quick to keep on this side of Jo'-dan. There was quite a rush on that bore then — mostly Yankees. You could tell to a hair's breadth just how long a man had lived in Moncton by the amount of interest he took in the thing. The new-comer couldn't sleep at nights. First he'd make a point of coming here twice a day and hang about pur- posely the rest of the day answering visitors' questions. Gradually that new-comer's enthusiasm kind of waned, and he'd catch on to the solemn fact that the rest of his fellow-citizens were looking at him with the knowing gaze that says as plain as words, * We've been through the same symptoms ourselves, old man, and we're cured.' Then he'd

THROUGH CANADA 27

cut down his visits to once a day, next he'd save up his curiosity for Sundays, and after that he'd keep it for vay-cations and Church festivals, and finally for Christmas. It wasn't long then before he would quit entirely, and any luckless visitor who happened to run up against him with a question about the time that the wave was due, would never know the close call he had for a visit to the angel country."

He paused to take breath and to glance down the bend searchingly.

'* That's why they've hit on that bulletin idea now. You understand }

" Well, those were the days when Lorette Flamoose pulled off the world-famed sprint with the Moncton Bore. Lorette was a lumber jack, and a kind of flying machine without wings. Nobody ever saw him walk — he simply skimmed along. He was so used to moving quickly while log- driving and taking out key-logs from a jam and then rushing with the log forest through the rapids and over the falls, that he finally took it into his head to run a race with this wave. At first he'd get about a mile and quit, then he'd try a two-mile sprint, always neck and neck, and at last he came flying past the post-ofiice a whole length ahead of the crest in the middle of the river. He had won. You never saw such a sour-looking bore in all your life. It got to jumping the tide calendar, then to reducing its weight and volume, then to retiring for days and weeks on long vay-cations. Lorette used to come down to the river and jeer at it and throw stones at it and pull faces, just to make it mad and get

2 8 A MOTOR TOUR

busy and perform, but It never held its crest up again. He had knocked the heart out of it.

" Lorette's dead now, and I've a sort of sympathy for the wave, and when it comes back I'm going to boom it for all it's worth. I

believe there's big money in it as a show, and

Great God, look 1 "

" What ? Where ? "

He was pointing frantically up the river.

" Didn't you see it, man ? "

"It? You mean ?"

"The bore ! "

" No. Where ? "

'* There ! "

" Great Heavens. I'd forgotten all about it. I was just about to fall asleep."

The man's chuckle was heard again. " They all do it. They all fall asleep when the bore comes along. But it's passed."

I strained my eyes into the darkness. "Where .'' For Heaven's sake^ tell me where 1 "

" Fool 1 You said you had imagination. But you're like the rest. You have none. It passed us. I'll swear to that, for it's exactly ten- ten o'clock, Atlantic time."

Madly I turned — in bed and awoke.

CHAPTER III

A NOTHER early start, a keen wind and /^L bright sunshine, improved roads and

r — ^ a beautiful countryside — these were -*- -^~ the essentials of the morning's run to St. John. The non-essentials were comprised in a choice collection of impossible Indian words, embalmed in the names of the valleys and towns hereabouts. In a weak moment some one had dubbed the former Petticodiac, Anagance and Kennebecasis. He was probably never called upon to spell them in public. But the names of the towns were positive crimes on the part of their anonymous christeners. They leaped from the quaint fancifulness of Economy to Penob- squis ; then they grew worse : they became inhuman. It seemed impossible to believe that men had actually thought of naming villages Plumweseep, Apohaqui, Passakeag, Nanwigeauk, Quispamsis and Scoudouc, and had escaped lynching.

To make matters worse, I was compelled to inquire my way. Pronunciation of names was out of the question, and the chauffeur was no help since he knew only American English. I would stop a man, therefore, along the road and ask in indefinite unconcern :

29

30 A MOTOR TOUR

"How does one get to the town of" (looking at the map) " of — of — P-w-rrr — asis ? "

Then I would look up in the air, or at the hills, or down at the river ; anywhere rather than at the man. It seemed cruel to demand so much of him and then to hurry or to embarrass him. The query would, of course, produce no sign of intelligence, and the terrible word had to be pointed out to him on the map. Some awful pronunciation would thereupon escape him ; I would listen to his directions with trepidation and forget the name completely the moment he was out of sight. The phonetics of such words as Manawagonish, Kouchibouguag and Shinimacas produced a kind of mental paralysis ; but when it came to the prospect of tackling Choctav/ perpetra- tions like Toutimogouchiasibash and the full- flavoured Pugwashsourispagdhaliouchen, I gave orders to change our course and fled.

The census list is bound to be low in places blessed with such names. Immigrants with large families must move off in sheer self-protection. No school teacher could run school and ever hope to get beyond the name of the town in the curriculum. Expressive signs doubtless are often substituted for the names, otherwise an active phonetic eruption would have long ago been inevitable, and people would have cut the words ruthlessly down until every branch and twig and leaf had been lopped off and they stood out, fresh and clean and sane, as Pen, and Plum, and Apo, and Pass and Nan, or Quis and Scou, Man and Kou, and Shin, and Tout, and Pug. It was only by some similar pruning method that simple

THROUGH CANADA 31

Welsh folk saved themselves when primitive man cursed one of their villages with a serpentine nomenclature embracing the entire description of a church in a hollow behind a meadow in front of a shop before a wood with a little path running through the graveyard, and so on. After thousands of years of philological oppression, they rose and swept the whole name away save for the one syllable "church." And "Church" that village is called to-day.

The people whom we met on the road were mostly Scotch in nationality and patriarchal in type. Many were cutting hay with great scythes, women working by their sides at lighter jobs. The wooden farm or village houses, constructed of clapboards and standing on brick foundations, with a brick chimney oddly cropping out of the wood, were generally fenceless and gardenless and innocent of paint. But they were human homes that, withal, clung to one's sympathies. They spoke eloquently of hopes and struggles, and of the hard fight with the soil to win a foothold in what had once been an inhospitable, but always picturesque, wilderness. Behind the farmer of New Brunswick it was not difficult to " sense " the forest, behind that the stream, behind them the moose and the caribou and the bear, unexplored rivers teeming with fish, and the wild, free air of mountain and lonely valley.

Occasional ox-teams dragging wagons came into view — splendid beasts, absolutely steady under automobile fire. They turned neither " right nor left, and slowly passed us without deign- ing to give the car so much as a look. This

32 A MOTOR TOUR

majestic indifference, compared with the skittish timidity of the horses, was stoicism itself. But presently I observed that the Canadian ox wore his yoke upon his head instead of his neck, a circumstance that may have partly accounted for his lethargic docility. A broad bar of wood fitted closely behind and around the horns, being held in place by stout leather straps bound tightly across the skull. The tongue of the wagon, attached to the bar between the oxen, was thus raised to the level of the creatures' eyes, and the strap could be tightened only by a man bracing his knee against the broad skull and pulling with all his might.

It would be worth while knowing how the ox regarded this method of harnessing. At all events, the fine fellows strode along as solemn as saints and as bold as buccaneers. The ox-team is unfortunately an institution fast disappearing before a new civilization that, influenced by the cities, is ruthlessly tearing up by the roots the things of the past ; but there is a leisurely, pastoral air about the remaining creatures and the accompanying " Gee-haw "-ing and rumbling and shambling, which makes them enjoyable and links them closely with the meadows and farms of the pioneers who first settled these wilds. The ox-wagon alone remains from French feudal days and those stirring times when men and women of British stock buried their dead in the furrows of the ploughed fields.

The Maritime Provinces had revealed to me, however, a much more conservative world than I, in common with other Englishmen, might have

THROUGH CANADA 33

expected. I was in a big country, but it — at least that part to which I should be limited before I struck the St. Lawrence — was not without a frame to environ and even to isolate it from what I believed to be the rest of Canada. The land- scapes of these first days were quite in keeping with the people. They were not distinctly American, Continental, nor suggestive of the emi- grant who was slowly coming into possession of a virgin soil to develop its resources and found a mighty state. The pioneer spirit had apparently long since fled or remained only as aromas linger in an old linen chest. I was in a settled country, definitely established. There was every evidence of solid conditions, of home love, and that larger home love, patriotism, which looks upon the boundary of its own grounds as upon a frontier and has no longer any desire to jump it, except by means of a telephone or a library book. There is no real sense of nationality until a plot of God's earth has been endowed with one's deep and unchanging love. Compared with these steady-going Maritime farmers, the Westerner is a nomad, a great nation-builder as yet lacking the foundations of nationality, since he sells his land on occasion as lightly as he swallows his dinner. Perhaps it is we wanderers from our own national paths and highways who feel more keenly than he the realness of that wide country, where a dusty, uneven trail sprawls out of the sunset, inviting us to partake of that stirring universal life which our souls so eagerly crave.

Not a little of this conservatism of the Canadian East is due to the engrafting of a

D

34 A MOTOR TOUR

population of Tory stock upon a contented French peasantry, followed by the discovery of a new and remote West that drained the Mari- time Provinces of their young blood. Thomas Chandler Haliburton, in " Sam Slick," has sati- rically preserved for posterity the tradition of this particular characteristic of the East. " Slick," in popular belief, has always stood for the avowed cynic at the expense of the Maritime Canadian ; and it is thanks to him that the latter, owing to his true-blue loyalty to the Empire, has won the contemptuous soubriquet of " Blue Nose."

Most of the farms, as seen from the highway, had wood lots, besides arable land for hay and other crops, and pasture for the stock. The wood lot provided the farmer with his fuel, his fencing, and his building timber. Though this was an apple country, apple trees did not appear abundant, at least by the roadside. The farmers, who came out for a leisurely and curious inspec- tion of the car and its equipment, confided to me that they exported all their best products. Anent apples and shoemakers' children, 1 was reminded of the story of the fellow who sold his best fruit in English markets, reserving only what was not fit to eat as fodder for the cattle and hogs. Occa- sionally, however, the craving for the acid flavour of an apple was so overpowering that what the catde refused he himself ate rather than waste.

At St. John, where the Mayor, some of the leading automobilists, and a few very steep hills received us, my attention was proudly called to a handsome monument and to an inscription to the effect that in early days ten thousand United

THROUGH CANADA 35

Empire Loyalists had landed at the market slip and thus preserved a large portion of North America for the Crown.

United Empire Loyalists ! In Halifax I had been introduced to a gentleman who had remarked incidentally that he was a descendant of the "U.E.L.'"s, I had scarcely noticed at the time what he said. But I ought to have grasped him warmly by the hand and shown some real emotion and pride in his acquaintance. I ought to have known my history better than I did — to have been acutely aware that there is no part of Canada, or indeed of the British Empire, where loyalty to the Imperial idea is so well understood as in the Maritime Provinces. I ought to have been mobbed for my ignorance, for not to know what an " U.E.L." is, is not to know the most glorious historical fact in Canada — is to be excluded from even a bowing acquaintance with its best stock, its truest patriots, its finest citizens, its staunchest British bulwarks. If you are unfamiliar with " U.E.L. "ism, you know absolutely nothing of Canadian history in the stirring days of the American Revolution, for that Revolution without the " U.E.L."s is like the French Revolution without Robespierre or Roman history without Julius Caesar, or Slavery without Wilberforce or Abraham Lincoln. The Exodus of the " U.E.L."s stands for supreme devotion to a flag and a cause that was hallowed by suffering ; it ranks the men and women who took part in it as the Pilgrim Fathers and Mothers of Canada. Indeed, com- pared with their lot — for thousands of them suffered torture, imprisonment and ignominious

^6 A MOTOR TOUR

death — that of the Pilgrims to America was a bed of down.

And yet I had to plead ignorance to the most stirring feature of British Colonial history !

I began a hurried search through encyclopedias and several weighty tomes that threatened to detain me indefinitely. What I found was that at the bemnning of the American Revolution two- thirds of the entire population of the thirteen colonies were Loyalists. Many, however, in- fluenced by fear of the Continental Congress, soon threw in their lot with the Revolutionists, leaving those who still remained faithful to the King and his Constitution to suffer the confiscation of their property and to endure many indignities. As the war progressed the Revolutionists grew more and more intolerant of the Loyalists — or Tories, as they were termed by Americans — and thousands in self-defence took up arms for the cause of the Mother Country. When the war was over and the Loyalist hope of seeing peace restored under the old conditions was for ever destroyed, the men and women v/ho had remained faithful to the ideal of a United Empire were in a sad predicament. England had signed the treaty of Versailles at the expense of her Loyalists, who were now, in the new country, nothing less than " traitors."

"Canada," says Mr. Beckles Wilson in his "Ro- mance of Empire," " was to be the Canaan of the Loyalists. ... It was time for them to journey forth from the new republic which they despised and distrusted. Somewhere — for most of them knew it but vaguely — in the northern wilds, in the virgin forests of pine and maple and hemlock, in the solitude of lakes and rivers,

THROUGH CANADA 37

which no man of English blood had ever seen, was the refuge the Loyalists sought. No longer could they hope their confiscated property would be restored, or even that the little they had left would be secured to them. . . .

" Thousands had perished ; thousands had sought refuge in England ; thousands had recanted. Fifty thousand now set out, with their wives and children and such belongings as were left to them, to traverse the hundreds of miles which lay between them and their new homesteads in Canada. These United Empire Loyalists were the fathers of English Canada. Comfort came to them in a proclamation that England would not think of deserting them. . . . Land and money were bestowed upon them freely. . . . There are few tales which history has to tell so stirring and noble as the exodus of the Loyalists. . . . The exodus was divided into two main streams, one moving eastward to Nova Scotia, . . . the other westward to a region north of Lake Ontario. . , . Many had travelled by wagons from North Carolina and Georgia, exposed to insult and danger all the way. Those who followed the eastern course landed at the mouth of the St. John River, New Brunswick, on the i8th of May, 1783, a day still cele- brated in the city of St. John. They took up settlement in the meadows of the Bay of Fundy. . . .

" No one will know, because no one has told, all that these brave pioneers underwent for their devotion and fidelity. You will see to-day, on the outskirts of the older settlements, little mounds with moss-covered tombstones which record the last resting-place of the forefathers of the hamlet. They do not tell you of the brave hearts laid low by hunger and exposure, of the girlish forms wasted away ; of the babes and little children who perished for want of proper food and raiment. They have nothing to tell of the courageous, high-minded mothers, wives and daughters who bore themselves as bravely as men, complaining never, toiling with the men in the fields, banishing all regrets for the life they might have led had they sacrificed their loyalty."

38 A MOTOR TOUR

So much for Canadian history. It was plain that another Longfellow was needed to chronicle, in a poem of romantic melancholy like " Evange- line," all the fidelity to principle, all the devotion and self-sacrifice, all the misery and pathos of the story of the "U.E.L."s. That story ruffles but little the surface of modern life ; the old-time virtues which it represents flower in hidden places, creeping into the background and shunning the larger world. It has doubtless found its way out of Literature into Life, where like a tiny seed it grows, a secret power in shaping the nobler qualities of those who treasure it. For I take it that the true pride of descent — whether it be from Pilgrim Father, Cavalier or Loyalist — is not represented by those who worship such a meaning- less anachronism as a coat-of-arms, but rather by those who make themselves worthy of their ancestors by out-virtuing the virtues of those past heroes. The great-grandchildren of the United Empire Loyalists may well leave the American craze for escutcheons to those who need such artificial claims to merit, and, looking proudly out upon the lakes and rivers, valleys and woodlands won for them by their forefathers, may vow that their patriotism shall be no less " true blue" than that pioneer patriotism of old which alone stamped and weighed the people in the balance of good citizenship.

But long before the day of the Empire Loyalist, the valley of the St. John had boasted the white settlements that followed the arrival of Champlain and De Monts. Here had stood the fort of Charles de la Tour, whose wife won a

THROUGH CANADA 39

notable place in history by her splendid resistance to the siege of her husband's rival, Charnisay. Here, still later, in Fort Howe, one Cobbett did duty as infantryman and fell in love with a little maid-of-all-work who was scrubbing out a washtub in the snow. In order to preserve his treasure for himself, the story runs, he sent her to England until such time as he could marry her. Until his arrival she maintained herself with domestic labour, and was thus able to return to him, un- touched, the hundred and fifty guineas he had given her. Truly a model wife ! And yet this paragon who figures so largely in the anecdotes of that time must have been rather an unmitigated drudge. One can see her cooking Cobbett's meals and cleansing Cobbett's house, blacking and mending Cobbett's shoes and hose, and generally keeping Cobbett as neat and clean as her floors and tables and pots and pans. But if Cobbett was anything of the man I take him to be, he must, in spite of his physical comfort, have spent a good many days in a pathetic hunt after some of his lost, early ideals !

We viewed the famous Reversible Falls of St. John's River from the tonneau. The miracle, like the Daily Miracle at Moncton, refused to work while we looked on, because it, too, was a phenomenon of high tide. It was explained to me, however, that the reversible-ness was due to the fact that the river-level at low tide is some fifteen feet, and that the tide of the Bay of Fundy raises the water in the harbour more than twenty- five feet. At half tide the waters on the gorge are level ; at full tide they pour over the rocks

40 A MOTOR TOUR

and surge up the river. When the tide is out they drop down into the harbour for many feet. Thus the phenomenon !

The roads which we followed along the river were hardly worthy of their scenic setting. Cer- tainly the composition of earth and stream pro- duced the most enchanting effects, and by the exercise of a little imagination one could still see the great pine trees which in past decades floated on its broad bosom — masts for the wooden walls of Old England.

My aim was to reach Fredericton, the capital of New Brunswick, for the night, and so I pushed with all haste northwards along the rough high- way which flanks the Nerepis and Oromocto rivers and eventually joins the main stream and its chain of lakes. At Hoyt, however, the village postmistress remarked that there was an inn at Fredericton Junction, and eventually, since hills interfered with the speed of the journey, I was glad to take advantage of her mformation. At the little inn — where the odomoter registered 150 miles for the day's run — a pleasant-looking young woman divided her attention between an exacting baby and her guests at supper, which was served in a small back room, where a big stove strove vainly to counteract the chilly effect of the linoleum-covered floor. Tea and Canadian steak, of doubtful cut, but usually served under the imposing name of "tenderloin" or "sirloin," followed by cake and canned fruit, proved to be the staples of the meal. There was a little guest parlour in the front of the house, where the assis- tant waitress and a lady caller passed the time

THROUGH CANADA 41

exchanging light and cheap badinage with a gentleman visitor from the adjoining bar. The floor was of hardwood and uncarpeted, while a tiny jet of acetylene gave niggardly of its light. In one corner stood a cradle, in another a what- not littered with hoary literature.

During the evening some sportsmen arrived at the little inn with their guns. One of these men I had met at Halifax. They were out for big game, and everybody was much more interested in moose than roads, since the season for moose stalking was in full swing in the neigh- bouring hunting-grounds. Here are forests of primeval solitudes, where course streams whose sources are unknown ; here are lofty cataracts whose hoarse soliloquy is seldom heard by human ear ; beautiful lakes without a name, " their eternal stillness broken only by the rattle of the kingfisher, the leap of the land-locked salmon, the uncanny laughter of the loon, or the plunging stride of the wading moose."

In these forests the moose and the caribou share the over-lordship. The caribou, followed by the black bear, roams in search of the stationary home in which no caribou has ever been known to abide. Imbued with the restless spirit of the age, he is always in a hurry to reach some other place where he can at once make pre- parations to hurry back again.

My Halifax acquaintance proved to be very communicative, and incidentally gave me some interesting information as to the methods of stalking the huge quarry.

" September," he said, " is the * calling ' season

42 A MOTOR TOUR

— that supreme test of the woodsman's art. Then Mr. Moose's hearing and scent are nothing short of marvellous. It's only a good hunter who can deceive him with the plaintive, soul-moving melody of a twenty-inch long birchen horn into thinking that a maiden moose is summoning him to her mystic bower. But all the time you're playing a love ballad on the horn, you may be sure that if you're not careful his long white nostril is about to catch your scent. He's a born maestro, too, and he'll detect the first false note in the music. Make a miss-step, moreover, and your chances of ever catching sight of him will be slim. If you do see him, it is because his conjugal susceptibilities these days get tlie better of his judgment. Then he comes swaggering up the marshy shore, or hooking his way jauntily through the bushes in sheer insolence of strength. You might think that he has caught your scent, and that he is going to hurl the two thousand pounds of flesh and bone and antler at you. But you'll be mistaken. He is telling the world as plainly as he can that if there should happen to be any other bull moose hankering after maiden love in those groves where he already has a tryst, he is going to have his scalp if it takes all night to do it.

" I remember my first experience of moose hunting quite vividly. I had never even heard of moose in the old country, and when an acquaint- ance suggested that I should accompany him to the Tobique and shoot moose, I had an idea that it was something like stag or deer hunting. I guess he knew I was green by what I said, but he

THROUGH CANADA 43

never let on. He merely said he'd like to show me his * first moose.' Everybody, you know, has a * first moose,' and gets the head stuffed and stuck up on his wall, even if he has to have the wall underpinned or the house enlarged to hold it. After that he makes a rug of the skin, and ink horns, brush-holders, pipe frames and goodness knows what else of the feet, besides backs of chairs of the ribs, and gate-posts of the leg bones. Well, this acquaintance of mine had a big two hundred-pound head hanging over his office desk, and what with its monster size and the huge spread of the antlers, and the fierce look of the brute, I was badly scared.

"* There you are,' he said proudly, * that's my " first moose." '

" * Great Scot ! ' I gasped. * Is that a moose ? '

" * Why, no ; that's only a tiny chunk of him, but we had to take the windows out to get even that in,' he said playfully.

" * And you mean to say that we're to stand up and shoot those monsters with mere guns 1 '

" ' Yes ! '

'* * How many g — guns ? '

" * One, of course.' This airily.

'* * Not cannons with explosive shells ? You're sure ? '

*' * You bet not. We do of course use dynamite to blast a way for them through the forest. Otherwise they'd knock the trees down and that's against the law.'

« • All right,' I said, * but I reckon you'll have to excuse me this time. Why didn't you

44 A MOTOR TOUR

tell me that we were out after Miocene ptero- dactyls, and I'd have brought a six-inch gun from Halifax.*

" * Oh, pshaw ! Once you get used to it, you'll think nothing of receiving a charge of a score of these brutes. The only thing to do is to keep your balance and not to spoil your aim — the earth shakes so ; but you'll soon get your " moose legs." '

" It wasn't until after I'd been hunting a good many moons that I got my ' first moose.' I was returning with my wife in high dudgeon at the end of the season and waiting for the train at the forest station. Just as the train was due, what should I see but an old bull moose standing on the track not more than a couple of hundred yards away, looking straight at me and motionless as a statue. I guess he'd grown a bit careless in his old age, or he'd been watching my frantic endeavours to bag one of his kind and had a sort of inkling how mad I was. My ! how I trembled with excitement, and how my fingers felt like thumbs while I fumbled for the cartridges packed away. Heaven knew where ! And when I'd at last shot him, it seemed like cruelty to animals. I never heard the last of that affair. Some of my friends declared that the old fellow was either too paralysed to move or that he'd deliberately com- mitted suicide. The badgering I got from the people on that train, too, wasn't any child's play. Anything, they insinuated maliciously, that would let a train run over it ought to be sold for dog meat ; and, to tell you the truth, that's about what did become of the moose, for 1 left him on

THROUGH CANADA 45

the station platform, glad enough to get away from the scene of my ignominious exploit."

"That's almost as good as a moose story that I heard in the States," chimed in a bystander, settling comfortably down to his yarn. " A circus had just arrived in a little out-of-the-way town in New England, and there were of course the usual side-show features. One of the posters made a particular appeal to old man Smith, paterfamilias. It was the most educational thing he'd seen. It was hung outside of a tent, and bore in big bold letters —

" * Walk in ! Walk in ! Now showing 1 The Biggest Moose in America ! Walk in and see him 1 Only ten cents ! '

" The * Biggest Moose ' was something the children certainly ought to see. So Smith hunted up the little Smiths forthwith and took them along with him to the circus.

"The keeper ushered them through the Big Moose's turnstile, while father Smith waited alongside to pay the bill.

" ' One — Two — Three — Four — Five '

counted the keeper, slowly. His eyes began to bulge.

" ' Six— Seven !— Eight ! ! '

" Still the young Smiths in graded sizes filed past.

" ' Nine ! 1 !— TEN ! ! ! ! '

"The keeper's eyes bade fair to burst from their sockets.

" ' ELEVEN ! ! ! ! ! '

" The keeper was gasping.

" * TWELVE !!!!!! Walk in, sir ! *

46 A MOTOR TOUR

he cried. * There's not a cent to pay. Your family's as big a show for my moose as my moose is for your family . . . Walk right in ! ' "

On our departure next morning from Fredericton Junction, every one assured us we should meet bad "going," describing the roads with disagreeable uniformity of detail. We had not "gone" far when we picked up a passenger — a tall, deaf old man, who was footing it into Fredericton with the aid of a stick, and who, as soon as he understood the invitation, threw his stick into the tonneau and clambered laboriously after it. He was an old-time native, a true type of the United Empire Loyalist, and as proud as a child of his first ride in an automobile. Very shortly, however, his condescending, kingly greet- ings of less fortunate friends passed by the road- side were forgotten in a desperate clinging to the sides of the tonneau, as the ruts threatened to land him again in the highway from which he had come. Looking over my shoulder, I found him clutching frantically and staring down at the mud with a resentful, unbelieving air that showed he was quite unable to account for the conditions of his local thoroughfare. Now and then, after a particularly lively jolt or pitch, I could hear him murmur —

" Never seed such roads in all my life. They've never been so bad since I can remember ! "

The highway which led from Fredericton to Kingsclear and Woodstock offered a smooth surface, gentle grades, and a fine view of the upper St. John River. Every island was dupli- cated with photographic fidelity in the limpid

THROUGH CANADA 47

waters ; and the fresh revelation at each bend of the great stream would have perfectly reproduced the green hills and deep blue waters of its beautiful predecessor had it not surpassed it in dignified grandeur. The morning and the greater part of the afternoon wore away, and still there was the same succession of magical and enchanting per- spectives, of fir-covered slopes, and broad, undu- lating sweeps of land laid out in checkerboard fields. There was an apparently unending chain of farms, settlements, towns, and little white churches, while the river, like a wide belt of liquid light and colour, ever stretched itself to the north as it threaded the spacious green intervals of its noble watershed. Rising in the spruce- clad hills of northern Maine and receiving in succession the waters of the St. Francis and Madawaska, it formed for many miles the boundary between that state and New Brunswick.

At noon we drew up for lunch at a wayside inn, for substantial towns persisted in refusing to " happen " in conjunction with an appetite. Often a city or town appeared temptingly in the distance, with every promise of timing itself to luncheon or dinner, only at the last moment to retire before a vicious-looking swamp or a regiment of steep hills. Sometimes, owing to the ineradicable instinct of chauffeurs to economize on petrol, we were held up trying to convince the remaining drop of " gas " that it was capable of doing the work of a couple of gallons, and reached our hotel long after the dining-room had closed its doors for the night.

Close to this particular inn, a tiny stream

48 A MOTOR TOUR

plunged down the hillside — Its spray blown by the wind on to the rough sward — and scurried off to the river below. A portion of the little wooden settlement had escaped to the other side of the river, as though there had been an estrange- ment in its family which could not be healed. A slatternly old woman sat by a stove in the entrance of the inn, while an old man, with watery eyes, occupied a neighbouring bench and at frequent intervals fed the stove with logs. Neither person spoke. The dining-room was scrupulously clean, but bucolic. Cups, saucers and tumblers were dark brown, huge and en- crusted like majolica — evidently heirlooms of the family. When one drank, it was impossible to say whether one was looking at tea, coffee or beer, or even milk. The repast consisted of the Inevitable fried eggs, bread and butter, and a luxurious mince-pie, helped down with a deadly brew of senna and hay, with more than a dash of gall as flavour, and boiled up for a second time n/ after standing for a year. This brew was politely offered under the name of " tea."

A road followed our course on the other side of the river. When our highway grew hilly we wished we were on the other, but when, presently, our vis-a-vis shot up into the air to disappear in a thick coppice, we were shamelessly content with the gifts provided us by the gods of travel. The wind was strong and repeatedly blew out the sun or covered it with black, angry clouds. The sun took this interference calmly enough, and without getting too hot about the matter generally had the clouds away in a jiffy. Finally, the

THROUGH CANADA 49

wind gave up the unequal contest, and, calling home the dark clouds, sent out big, pufFy white ones that rode up and down the firmament at varying aerial levels, sailing bravely over our heads and disappearing at last with a fine frenzy over the northern hills.

Villagers took curious stock of us here and there, as we pulled up for supplies, but we were too much occupied with the sublime object of sweeping across the continent to suffer for more than a fleeting moment the attentions of the insignificant village community.

As if to rebuke us for our arrogance, fourteen miles out of Grand Falls, where we were to pass the night, the petrol gave out. It was already dark, and there were bad hills and a swamp paved with logs ahead. To add to the charm of the situation, the petrol had chosen to exhaust itself at a moment when the car was climbing an ascent. To go upwards any further was an impossibility ; it was an equal impossibility to descend backwards, for the road behind was narrow and would lead us again into an ugly marsh that was covered with a rank growth to the edge of the wheel ruts. "What we needed was a down grade all the way to Grand Falls, or a pair of horses, or a steam roller to smooth out the roughness of the path. But all these were as unobtainable on the hillside as was petrol. Men from a neighbouring farmhouse emerged from the shadows and silhouetted them- selves in helpless curiosity in the strong rays of the lamps. After some time, by dint of blowing into the tank to gain pressure, the car was started again. Two big hills surmounted on a thimbleful

£

50 A MOTOR TOUR

of remaining liquid power — it was a miracle I It was a miracle, too, that the unfortunate chauffeur did not burst his cheeks or succumb to asphyxia, for it fell to his lot to blow into the petrol tank every few moments of the remaining journey. The minutes spun themselves into hours ; the hours seemed to drag themselves wearily into days. How tremblingly we scanned each suc- ceeding rise in the ground ! How joyously we hailed every descent, every slight declivity, until swamp and hills were past and the small hotel of Grand Falls stood before us in silent welcome 1

It was nearly ten o'clock, over one hundred and sixty miles had been travelled that day, and the car had received its baptism of mud in real earnest so early in the tour.

The next morning shone cold and clear as the car paused on the Grand Falls bridge to allow of a view of the roaring torrent rushing over a precipice and swirling away thi-ough a rugged gorge. What a picture must be presented here when, in the spring freshets, thousands of spruce logs go whirling over the brink, shoot up like catapults from the basin below, and then go tearing through the foaming gorge !

In spite of the boggy and rough roads, the car made good time, especially as the change from Atlantic to Eastern time gained us an extra hour at Edmundston, where the valley of the St. John merges into that of the Madawaska.

It was warm and sunny as the automobile mounted the hill to the main street. A most casual glance was enough to discover that the

THROUGH CANADA 51

town displayed unmistakable signs of Gallic occu- pancy. Stopping to inquire the way of a heavily moustachoied personage basking in front of the hotel, I came inadvertently upon the theosophist lecturer and traveller, Dr. Ridder of Chicago, better known by his characteristic American title of "The Millionaire Tramp." He is, I believe, an associate of Jack London, the novelist purveyor of that strong meat of the wild and the sea which is too brilliantly primal for certain over-squeamish tastes. At Edmundston, the doctor was dressed in a Norfolk suit of thick tweeds, and a flaring red tie accentuated his social creed.

We shook hands, and he told me genially, in the sunshine, of his philosophy of life, of his present lecturing tour, and his other tramps in a country where long distance foot-tours are usually relegated to tramps of the " hobo " variety and unsavouriness. He spoke in American phrase- ology with a German accent, but he looked like a man who had been mothered by English by- ways. His whole being seemed to say, " Look here ! I am emancipated, free to wander in the air and sunshine. 1 am excused the toil of the hands that I may help those who are not free — or who do not know that they are. While they labour with the flesh I work with the spirit to teach them the true philosophy and happiness of life. For only he can enjoy real success or joy, who has lived long, laughed often, and learned how to love his fellow-men ; who has filled his needs, accomplished his task, and made the world better for his presence."

"I believe," said the doctor, "that the ideal

^7

52 A MOTOR TOUR

existence is that of the man of whom his fellows can say that he has never cost them a moment's pain or bitterness."

The altruistic virtues — Love, Justice, Charity, Simplicity 1 The common platform of the pure in heart, the fundamentals of gregarious man 1 Dr. Ridder was devoting himself to the road to keep in touch with these. He was not banishing himself to hermit solitudes that he might teach the wholesomeness of life in a distant gospel. His audiences were close at hand, the labouring people of the highway and the villages of the countryside. Indeed, I fancied that many of them had already learned of his creed, since there seemed a strange absence of that fear and doubt engendered by anxiety for the morrow. The means of subsistence, present and prospective, to the healthy and the active were never wanting.

Let the man who has triumphantly survived shipwreck in the Sturm and Drang of European city life ponder over that ! Lack is but the out- come of the unrecognized problem of distribution.

From an elevated position above the Mada- waska I took my last view of the Maritime Provinces, recalling a thousand freshly acquired souvenirs — the grim majesty of Halifax, the white-steepled churches of fertile valleys, the ragged orchards on either side of the red soil roads, the sunlight and shadows of eight crowded days of motoring, the ranges of forest- covered hills, the farms and villages, the air of plentitude and not too stressful activity, the quaint mediocre inns of the wayside, the citizen- countrymen who formed such a pleasant contrast

THROUGH CANADA 53

to the solid peasantry of Europe — above all, the general atmosphere of comfort and competency. There had been thousands of acres that, still undeveloped, seemed to mock the wretchedness and misery of the submerged and disinherited of the British Isles, to scoff and taunt an English- man for the supineness of his statesmen, for his overcrowded cities, and their sickness and squalor on the one hand and on the other their countless organized charities which gnaw at the manliness of the nation even while they relieve its sufferings. What a heritaore here for those who had no foot- hold at home ; what life and hope in these kindly, sunny valleys for the ignorant and wretched — England's incubus of crime and misery !

1/1

'^JV ^

WMMi

n

ft

CHAPTR IV

NI'AV i'rancc I .:,c change from the Maritime 1 nniccs to Quebec Province cai suddenly. An in- stant, and I /as surrounded with I'rcfich faces, French farn the French language, I'rcnch customs, Fren i peasants, French churches, I'Vench frogs, and French roadside calvaries. There were sn 1 woodland lakes with a wiKl grace of rugged b aty and weather-worn slopes dotted with clustc of alders and little copices of dwarf mountait >ine or beech saplings. A long, easy descent le to the Temiscouata Lake, a huge sapphire s amidst the emerald forests of its mountain sK cs, a world of beauty wholly deserted, save by ic wild-fowl and the iKcasion.al village which hi ged the long shore. There was a na d glor)* abo solitudes which even the p:sence ot the \ illages could not destroy Beaut)' was to waste. The railroad :.d advertised tried to exploit it, tried " ~"!e th and the indic^o v.ih

But the wor

rid hi

shown no

^ ... :^ ivJ a

were no paths anvidrivcways t

!HI0C^3i

' ' ' — Ikl

itjn.

seentf ■ ipr IS hioitfk -

""Hi 9K to IT.:

t

/iv^^.fV

■liAi

THROUCI CANADA

SS

11

4 I iot

the forest hillsides, ik belvederes.

The Madawaska an a fairyland of enchan overstocked with suci the effect of a by-prod out with lavish care mould. In a smaller c/e force of a St. Law they would have be seemed to have a n lation to the rest o1 must be confessed — tc eyes they were no less had they held the cer was one less alive tc loveliness that was alw always replete with lyi

Indeed, Canada to wild, makes_its strong

land.^^^ave lai

/illas in the clearings, no

Temiscouata had revealed lent. But in a country natural beauties they had t of Dame Nature turned ssness from an oft-used :ountry, lacking the tour nee or the Great Lakes, 1 marvels. Here, they rely naive decorative re- their world, though — it he sympathetic heart and moving and exquisite than e of a smaller stage, nor the eternal message of a /s beckoning and inviting,

charm.

ay, through its untutored St appeal. In Europe, in the transforming and re- ion on everything, leaving

her gentle whims. But ughtJ^^^ll of aloofness some of the .silence and rce. steal

■ '0 A j^.

CHAPTER IV

NEW France ! The change from the Maritime Provinces to Quebec Province came suddenly. An in- stant, and I was surrounded with French faces, French farms, the French language, French customs, French peasants, French churches, French frogs, and French roadside calvaries. There were small woodland lakes with a wild grace of rugged beauty and weather-worn slopes dotted with clusters of alders and little copices of dwarf mountain pine or beech saplings. A long, easy descent led to the Temiscouata Lake, a huge sapphire set amidst the emerald forests of its mountain slopes, a world of beauty wholly deserted, save by the wild-fowl and the occasional village which hugged the long line of shore. There was a naked glory about these solitudes which even the presence of the scattered villages could not destroy. Beauty was running to waste. The railroad had advertised it once, tried to exploit it, tried to people the purple slopes and the indigo waters with recreative crowds. But the world had shown no adequate enthusiasm in response, and the lake — as lovely as anything in Switzerland — remained a solitude. There were no paths and driveways to encircle

54

THROUGH CANADA 55

the forest hillsides, no villas in the clearings, no belvederes.

The Madawaska and Temiscouata had revealed a fairyland of enchantment. But in a country overstocked with such natural beauties they had the effect of a by-product of Dame Nature turned out with lavish carelessness from an oft-used mould. In a smaller country, lacking the tour de force of a St. Lawrence or the Great Lakes, they would have been marvels. Here, they seemed to have a merely naive decorative re- lation to the rest of their world, though — it must be confessed — to the sympathetic heart and eyes they were no less moving and exquisite than had they held the centre of a smaller stage, nor was one less alive to the eternal message of a loveliness that was always beckoning and inviting, always replete with lyric charm.

Indeed, Canada to-day, through its untutored wild, makes its strongest appeal. In Europe, in England, we have laid the transforming and re- forming hand of civilization on everything, leaving nothing to Nature and her gentle whims. But in Canada she has wrought a spell of aloofness as yet often uncontested, and hidden some of the choicest of her myriad treasures in a silence and a solitude through which we must, perforce, steal on tiptoe.

The St. Lawrence was visible in the sky — in the peculiar broad spaces of light that filled the world to the north — long before its shores at Riviere du Loup came into view. The afternoon had been divertingly full of the minor incidents of the road — a Gallic lunch at a Temiscouata

S6 A MOTOR TOUR

village inn, a running of the ordeal of scores of rampant dogs, and encounters with scared drivers who had frantically endeavoured to blindfold or hide away their perfectly docile steeds. But the bigness and grandeur, the majesty and beauty of the St. Lawrence were such as to sweep away all other memories, while the mind dwelt upon all the wonders before it in mountain and sky, in water and in air.

Afar off, on the opposite shores, rose the dim, blue wraiths of the Laurentians — that range over whose crests blow the winds direct and unob- structed from the North Pole. One might look in vain for signs of human settlement on their northern slopes. There, climate and latitude say to man : *' Thus far shalt thou go and no farther ! " In some remote glacial period, a vast salt sea, similar to that between Labrador and Greenland, covered the greater part of the Laurentian country to the depth of hundreds of feet. In the walls of these mountains, a glacier carved a way and formed the tremendous chasm of the famous tourist river, the Saguenay, which at its mouth is several hundred feet deeper than the St. Lawrence.

Riviere du Loup was a handsome riparian town, French- Canadian in character and situated well above the river. There appeared to be several excellent hotels as we passed through, but our concern was not so much with its hostelries as with the immediate requirements of the car. We found a petrol store run by a man apparently speaking a very pure Parisian French. As he turned the crank of the petrol

THROUGH CANADA 57

reservoir, he commented volubly upon the pro- spects and excitements of the journey before me.

" Vancouvaire ! Vancouvaire ! Ah ! si loin ! "

He spoke in tones eloquent of distance. He shrugged his shoulders, and the hand which was free began to move significantly. The mile- ages seemed to appal him. But he recovered himself and advised me to follow the route along the river to Quebec. The road would be perfect for three miles.

"And then?" I asked.

The significant shrugging recommenced.

" Hein ! C'est pas grande chose, ce chemin- la. Mais, que voulez vous en Canada, Monsieur ! Ce n'est qu'un Trail ! "

A trail ! A path which neither pick nor shovel nor steam roller had ever defiled, which would bring vividly back the pioneer world long since dead and gone ! The clutch was eagerly thrown in and the car sped, with a prolonged minor note, from the gesticulations into the avenue leading to the river.

The trail began where the smooth, concave road ended by the water's edge — a grassy path, / a couple of ruts in the sward with the bare, inter- ^ vening space marking the tread of the horse's hoofs, a narrow spoor along which the early French may have trekked. Over its unconven- ^^ tional surface the car sped like an arrow. The river spread itself over the earth like a sea, keeping company with us. So suggestive was the trail of the still distant West, and so suited to the moods of those mountain shores that I

58 A MOTOR TOUR

would not have exchanged my grassy carpet for the best macadam road in the world.

From it I saw the crimson sunset paint im- pressionistic pictures on the broad bosom of the placid river, and caught my first view of the long, narrow fields of the Habitant farmers. It passed through the rustic resort of Kamouraska, where I supped and slept. And it was there again when I set off in the brilliant sunshine of a Sabbath morning, waiting to conduct me along its time-worn path to Quebec.

Across the silver waters of the river there was a distant view of Cap a I'Aigle and Pointe au Pic which denoted the seaside resort of Murray Bay. A Canadian lady, who had spent some summers there with her children, told me that not so long ago Murray Bay had been a bit of the wild, nestling in a valley of mountain, river and stream. But the Quebecans had "dis- covered " its beauty, and invaded the rustic hotels and cottages to such an extent that the owners themselves were forced to find shelter in the stables. Still the transient, swallow community grew. Visitors speculated in house lots and built their own residences along the western shore of the Bay. Golf links and tennis courts appeared, and — the fortune of Murray Bay was made.

" I don't know how it would appeal to European tastes," she added, " but it has quite an Old World flavour. Shady walks and old- fashioned flower gardens, you know, and an old manorhouse close to the village church, and another manor, with thick walls and a mansard roof, just across Murray River ! Both houses

THROUGH CANADA 59

have their romances of British military days when the Frasers and the Nairnes were lords of the manor in these remote regions.

" You will get old manorhouses all the way to Montreal. I simply adore them. We look upon them out here as our * stately homes.' We're very proud of them, I assure you. Of course, you know all about the Repentignys' manor which figures in our Canadian classic, * The Golden Dog ' ? Well, you W'll find that these old houses tell not only the story of French- Canadian seigniorial life, but of stout British stock, strong hearted and deep faithed, which setded along these wilderness paths about the time of the American Revolution. There is many a thick wall and terraced walk that could tell a tale of thrilling interest, many a mansard roof or tiny belfry, peeping down the slopes to the St. Lawrence for a view of the mountains, that could whisper secrets of a noble estate where peasant and seignior lived in that Old World dignity which we have banished with our modernity."

A perilous route these broad reaches of the mighty river must have-made in those past days before the coming of a road along the shore ! The Indians, ere they had received the supreme gift of the horse, travelled by canoe, except for the portages, from one waterway to another. The early Europeans followed the same method of progression. The canoe of seignior or peripatetic shepherd of the human flock of that time was compelled to hug the rugged shores for safety, and there must have been many occasions when the occupant was storm-bound for days at a

6o A MOTOR TOUR

stretch. It was the custom for priests to celebrate mass by means of a small portable altar carried in the canoe. One can picture the dismay of waiting villagers, when, owing to a sudden storm that lashed the St. Lawrence into angry waves and blotted out the landscape with a driving rain, their missionary was obliged to postpone not only his arrival, but the long pent-up confessions, the penances, the burials, the baptisms and the marriages.

What a dramatic picture all this presents, lending a touch of real pathos to the road which I now followed 1

Being Sunday, we were continuously passing a procession of buggies and traps containing French Canadians in their Sunday best. They were headed for the churches whose twin spires could be seen for miles across the flats. High above the road a stately monastery and attendant church — easily the most striking features of the shores — came occasionally into view, but received only passing notice from the proletariat, v/ho were driving towards the village. At one comparatively small hamlet we found the good folks of the countryside drawn up under the shadow of a fane whose immense spires and high-pitched roof of burnished metal were startlingly out of pro- portion and keeping with their setting. The church seemed to have swallowed all the glory, all the importance of the locality. The road led to it rather than to the hamlet. Gigs by the score were drawn up before the west doors ; the horses of others were tethered in long rows to the iron railings along the sides. Every minute

THROUGH CANADA 6i

brought fresh arrivals — human and equine — from east and from west ; and from above a figure of the virgin, wearing a crown and "clothed with the stars," looked benignantly down upon the chattering groups of simple peasant folk. The church, no less than the regal figure ensconced in the lofty niche, stood out strikingly aloof from its humble surroundings. It was built of brick and stone and copper ; the houses were of clap- boards. It was noble, while the hamlet was ignoble. It soared while the hovels grovelled. It spoke of Things Eternal — the people of Things inconsequent and temporal. It spoke of Wealth, the people of Poverty. It embodied Privilege and the people Submission. It seemed to say —

" See what a blessed thing it is to give unto God through His Church. Look at my devout children down there. They think only of me and my adornment. They make themselves poor for my sake, and how happy and light-hearted and free from care they are ! Their fathers and their forefathers were just the same. They will pass away, for they are but milestones in the history of the Eternal Church, but their children will follow them and give of their alms as they have given."

And the church was doubtless right. Few of those gay and irresponsible Habitants beneath the shadow would murmur, would question the right of the church to be rich and beautiful, to be adorned with jewels of rare price, while Pro- gress, Modernity, the practical application of the Arts and Sciences, and even Sanitation, remained

62 A MOTOR TOUR

outside upon the steps. The life of the people centred in the church. With a distance of at least nine miles separating the parishes, there was little else to satisfy the social instinct of the Habitant. The church was not only his spiritual mentor, but it provided him his entertainment, his common rallying-point, his concerts, his theatres, his picture galleries, and his point of view.

Religion had now become the dominant and insistent note of the highway. There were numerous crosses by the wayside. Some of these rough, wooden Calvaries towered more than twelve feet above a decorated altar. The crown of thorns, the hammer and nails, the pincers, the ladder, the Roman soldier's spear and the sponge — all the dread material symbols of Christ's vicarious sacrifice — were there. A box for alms to help the dead through purgatory was placed at the foot of a cross. The roadside altars were usually deserted, but I was informed that in reality they formed a kind of family worshipping-place, where the Habitants, led by the head of the house in their devotions, came for prayer and thanksgiving and joined in the responses with the breezes and the birds.

The villages were generally long and straggling. They began with the name of one saint and ended with another, showing that in the course of the years two remote parishes had caught up with one another and decided to make common cause. Sometimes they had generously divided one saint between them, giving him the distinctive nomen- clature of " Little," " Middle," and " Big," accord- ing to the part of the village he inhabited. Out

THROUGH CANADA 6;^

of the long, winding funnel of the irregular main street the car would shoot into the wide open ^^ spaces of the country, to presently pass a great monastic establishment with its accompanying church, noble and majestic in its aloofness and casting a long shadow across some chance, miserable hut into which a Habitant and his numerous progeny had burrowed like so many rabbits. The houses, wherever I found them, seemed to make no particular effort to conform to any recognizable rules for town planning. They gave one the impression that they had been thrown down by the roadside and then kicked more or less into place. Some obtruded on the road ; others presented a sharp angle to it ; still others were so twisted that the front did duty as the back, and the persons in the kitchens enjoyed the landscape and the life of the highway, while those in the parlour contented themselves, per- force, with a view of the pigstye. One dwelling had actually climbed up the hill, and with a few of its followers had evidently conspired to form a rudimentary street just as the local authorities nipped the plot in the bud by interposing a fence. On the whole one rather sympathized with the houses, which had been wholly rural in their upbringings, and which now, after years of long custom as the humble homes of villagers, could not readily adapt themselves to the new-fangled ideas of urbanism which modernity had brought.

Plainly, the villagers were in sympathy with the reactionary movement. It must be a heavy blow, after going barelegged for a couple of generations, to be suddenly called on to invest in

64 A MOTOR TOUR

luxuries like shoes and stockings, furniture and oil lamps, new suits and tidy frocks. These people were country people and villagers per se — peasants stranded here out of Louis XIV.'s France on a continent which demands as one of the cardinal laws of social life that man shall be free and independent.

The voice that has called to the rest of the New World has been unheard by the Habitant, and he remains — is it a social slave in the heart of Arcadia ? These men and women seem to be not so much individualistic as types or personifications of a class which amidst change remains true to its ancient and now obsolete customs. The dominant note of the type is simplification. The Habitant has none of our mental and moral trepidations. He refuses to be drawn into the vortex of social struggle. His religion was fixed long ago. Sectarianism never has and never will worry him into his grave. He does not concern himself about fashions or fads, changes of Govern- ment or of ideas, or about the appearance of him- self or his home. He is content with little. He is fond of his family and abiding-place, and the latter is usually as small as the former is large.

Passing into some of the ragged litde houses, I invariably found the main room doing service as parlour, dining-room and kitchen, with a smaller room or two opening from it. In a corner a clumsy staircase led up to a lumber room and possibly a crowded bedroom under the sloping roof. To the casual visitor the children were almost uncountable, especially as often two or three families of relatives were living under the

THROUGH CANADA 65

same roof. A big stove usually occupied the centre of the floor, and almanacs and calendars of the Roman Catholic faith, crucifixes, and small coloured cards were everywhere in evidence. Good nature and hospitality reigned supreme, and smiles symbolized hearts that had all the enviable buoyancy and gaiety of the Latin races.

Here and there were other dwellings, generally isolated places of the shack order, where the kitchen had revolted and escaped into the road- way. One woman was baking bread in an open- air oven constructed of dried earth and stone — an elaborate affair, hooded in order to shelter it from the elements. It was much the same as the outdoor ovens which I had seen among the aborigines of Western America and in the Orient, where they have been an institution from time immemorial.

Along this primitive road, one is constantly reminded that the occupants of these shabby houses are the lineal descendants of those who, centuries before, had penetrated into the "Pays d'en Haut^' with a sublime courage and inspira- tion, to lift the veil from the Unknown World of the West. The faith and love with which they have clung to home and habit are only typical after all of the splendid Gallic bravery with which they have clung to a country. If anybody deserves Canada, surely it is this old- fashioned, English-language-murdering, tobacco- ,/ growing, semi-illiterate, easy-going, badly-dressed " antique " — the French Canadian.

Standing in his presence, one is almost ashamed to belong to that masterful, domineering

66 A MOTOR TOUR

race that disputes with him possession of a country which was so long ago the gift of Cartier, Champlain and Frontenac to France. The Gallic mark is on every building and every institution of the Province — upon dress, manners, habits, roads ; on restaurants and hotels, churches and holy days, vehicles and shops, books and names of streets.

It is years since France abandoned her child of the wilderness. But with a loyalty that must touch even an Englishman's heart, the child has remained faithful in spirit to its Latin parentage.

CHAPTER V

OUEBEC City is no place for a self- / respecting touring car. On landing from the Levis ferry- boat, there is apparently no way of mounting to the Upper Town except by a steep ascent following a winding approach to the ancient gates. Wolfe, in capturing the city, ascended by a convenient but equally tortuous path about three miles further up the river. Pedestrians now usually take the ascenseur, but a few were laboriously zig-zagging up the mountain-side as we emerged from the narrow alleys at the foot.

The " street " was paved with granite blocks, and in its upward progress described a huge " S." Had we been wise, we should have beaten a hasty retreat when retreat was still possible, or hitched our block and tackle to the University at the top and requisitioned a score of polite Frenchmen to haul us up. But we fatuously bombarded the hill to the accompaniment of a series of gatling- gun explosions from the "cut-out," while the polite Frenchmen looked on amusedly.

The car, heavily loaded, realized by some mechanical instinct before we did the absurdity of the unequal contest. It showed the white feather, and half-way up tried to run down again

67

68 A MOTOR TOUR

backwards. What it actually succeeded in doing was to come to a full stop athwart the line of traffic, while all Gaul collected on the side walks.

The situation was ludicrously humiliating. The delighted crowd did not scruple to point sarcastically to the inscription on the tire drum which flauntingly announced the Pacific as our destination. The lettering of the inscription, too, had grown to five times its normal size. I sprang out to lighten the load.

" Turn her round and back her up ! Quick 1 '* I cried, and ingloriously sought self-effacement among the onlookers. Here we were under- taking the longest road tour ever attempted in s/ Canada, and yet we were unable to climb a paved hill 1

The car manoeuvred for the right-about-turn while I glared into a shop-window with ostenta- tious indifference, and decided to go in and buy something for which I had no earthly need. From the inside of the shop, I could see the car creeping laboriously backwards up the hill while the crowd panted along in its wake.

Once on the summit, we had an unrivalled panoramic view of the St. Lawrence, Far to the left, under the serrated line of the blue Lauren- tians, a dent in the shore marked the foaming white Falls of Montmorency. In mid-distance, dividing the great stream into two channels, lay the verdant island of Orleans, which Cartier had christened the Isle of Bacchus owing to the tangle of wild vines which he found there. Across the river, directly before me, rose the gentle green slopes and glittering spires of Levis, the deep

THROUGH CANADA 69

green of whose landscape served to accentuate the silver grays and soft, filmy blues of the more distant hills to the south. Behind me, faced by the statue of Champlain, stood the modern chateau ; while further down, above the heads of the loiterers along the sunny Dufferin Terrace, rose the grim, gray wall of the ancient citadel, crowned by the symbol of world-wide Empire, the Imperial flag.

Here, as in Halifax, the visible emblems ot war were still prominent in peace. Quebec, a typical old-world city of narrow streets and em- battled gates, where beauty dallies with progress : Halifax, modern and ancient, with English tradi- tions as the potent factor in life — both are garrison cities ; both, pursuing such opposite ideals, claim to be in essence true Canadian. Yet Halifax is homogeneous, while Quebec is factious. One clings to an Empire ; the other, duo-linguistic, clings to two. One, open to the sea, welcomes all external influence ; the other, inland, surrounds itself with a rampart of insularity, prejudice and conservatism. One is sure of its goal and its future ; the other is at cross purposes with itself and its destiny.

As the car picked its precarious way along the winding, undulating streets, modernity and the past came rattling by us over the cobble stones. A long hook and ladder fire-truck, brave in new paint, and manoeuvring the abrupt corners of the narrow ways at imminent risk of rending itself asunder between the Scylla of the house walls and the Charybdis of a street car ! A two- wheeled, one-horse calhche^ with the driver

70 A MOTOR TOUR

perched on an improvised dash-board and crowded almost into the laps of his two passengers ! In what other city of Anglo-Saxon America, except, perhaps, New Orleans, could one find such a combination of the Old and the New ?

Thanks to an open sesame to prominent English-speaking families in Quebec, I found myself amidst a society English to the core in its habits, idioms and home life, and thoroughly Canadian in its cordial, spontaneous hospitality. On the western outskirts of a French city, in spite of a comparatively small Anglo-Saxon population, were charming villas and extensive estates enclosed by the shrubbery, stately trees and thick- hedged roads and lanes of England. Here the gravel of the driveways had been brought over from England ; there a drawing- room was "treated" in chintz; here was a Georgian mansion ; there was a half-timber Elizabethan grange. In all these houses the servants had been brought from England ; but many establishments would be closed to the severity of the long Quebec winters while the owners flitted across to London.

" If we only had English roads ! " sighed an acquaintance as we inspected his new motor car. " These powdered cinder coatings on the roads may be economical, but they're beastly uncomfort- able in dry weather."

"Cinders ! " I said. "That accounts for my getting into Quebec looking like a begrimed collier."

"Exactly! You wouldn't think, by George, that we're spending a mint of money every year

THROUGH CANADA 71

on roads, would you ? The trouble with us is that beggarly Statute Labour system which com- pels personal service on the roads, or accepts that ■ service instead of a cash tax. Rose out of the monarchical slave labour business in France of the Louis, you know. Wretched system from a business point of view, because we get no trained labour ! The farmer knows more about his fields than he does about highways. He does his roadwork grudgingly and badly, and as he votes the road superintendent into power, dis- cipline is out of all question. He is practically his own employer."

In spite of dusty roads, we enjoyed a run from Quebec to the world-famed shrine of St. Anne de Beaupre. The trip afForded a fine opportunity to view the villages and small towns of the St. Lawrence water-side. Here again magnificent churches, convents and monasteries stood out in strange contrast with the shabby wooden houses of the Habitant. Between the settlements stretched the long, narrow river farms peculiar to this neighbourhood. Beginning at the water's edge, these farms undulated over hill and vale and across the highway far back into the country- side. Separated from each other by rough rail fences, they had a comic resemblance to an army of uncoiled serpents, their heads in the river marshes and their tails resting on the hills. In reaUty they were the visible relics of the feudal system under which the land had been rented to the peasants by the seignorial owner, who in his turn had received the seignory from his over-lord in Paris. As a protective measure against Indian

V

72 A MOTOR TOUR

attack, and to assure a certain degree of communal life, the farmhouses were erected near the river, and the tenant was only secure in his holding as long as he paid his very nominal rent. In later days these farms were divided and subdivided along their length by the peasant owners in order to give equal benefits to their large families of sons.

Here, between Quebec city and Montmorency Falls, were the old earthworks thrown up by the French to prevent Wolfe's troops gaining access to the city from the flats. At the Falls them- selves, close to the edge of the thundering torrent still stands the plain Georgian country house which Queen Victoria's father, the Duke of Kent, occupied as a summer residence during his official life in Canada.

The pilgrim town of St. Anne is a garish- looking place of obvious peasant origin, although filled to-day with busy hotels and thriving board- ing-houses. To the simple Habitant it is as sacred as Rome is to the Italian, and even the railway which leads to it from Quebec has been consecrated and blessed by the Church. A long procession of men, young and old, lame and blind, were marching out of the church of St. Anne from Mass as we arrived. With eyes uplifted to the sunny sky, they crossed the open square in front of the edifice chanting a hymn of faith and praise. In spite of the roughness of the voices and the uncouthness of many of the pilgrims, the effect was singularly impressive. Many of them had already climbed the Sacred Stairs on their knees ; had implored the huge statue of St. Anne for intercession at the throne

THROUGH CANADA 73

of God ; had adored the sacred relic of the wrist- bone in its magnificent shrine. All had spent hours at the services in fervent devotion, and would doubtless return again for further suppli- cation in the afternoon.

It was the old story of simple peasant faith and hope of physical cures familiar throughout Europe, but gaining a peculiar significance by virtue of its setting on the soil of the New World. Viewing this religious pageant from the tonneau, one was not so much impressed by its incongruity as by the incongruity of the auto- mobile. One would have preferred a Sedan chair or an Indian canoe. And yet, is not this very same faith, distorted as it may be, the mainspring of even our twentieth-century existence } One has his St. Anne, another his doctor and his bread pill ; Jones has his woollen ; Smith his cotton underwear ; Brown has his anti-pneumonic mustard foot-bath ; Robinson his bare-foot cure in the early morning grass. Chumley is cured of tuberculosis by fresh air and exposure in cold latitudes ; his father by blankets and molly- coddling behind closed windows. Marchbanks swears by drugs and operation ; his brother by bone-twisting and muscle thumping ; his sister by anti-rheumatic earrings and a rabbit-foot ; while his son, perhaps, will some day cling to enforced baldness as the panacea for all human ailments. Some sort of shrine, indeed, seems necessary to man — and not only for his bodily but also for his spiritual well-being.

Have we not each, too, some loftier shrine at which we secretly worship, expecting some

74 A MOTOR TOUR

remarkable manifestation or favour ? Are we not all suppliants at some hidden altar reared upon the fabric of our innermost desires ? What we ask, and what the fulfilment, belongs only to ourselves. You at your own shrine may only guess the rites at mine ; I may only surmise the real nature of your Holiest of Holies.

Before leaving the city we spent an interesting hour or two at the immigrant wharves, watching the inflow of new life to Canada. Most of the people who crowded the sheds and sidings were going out to the prairies for which we were

• bound. The majority were of British stock, and N it formed a fascinating occupation to contrast the

finely alert Anglo-Saxon with the groups of brutish-looking peasantry from the Continent of Europe. One came across men and women in whose eyes the light of intelligence had never shone. By the side of a fair-haired, laughing ^. English girl stood a Roumanian peasant woman and her husband, who suggested the advanced guard of a horde of Huns on a new invasion of the civilized world. One wondered what Canada contemplated doing with such hopelessly raw material. Was she setting out on the quixotic mission of civilizing a peasantry gross, ignorant and superstitious ? Was she trying to bring light into these sullen, malicious faces by recast- ing them afresh in her melting-pot — to make good, enlightened citizens out of the dregs of

* social Europe ?

Quebec was celebrating its Labour Day with a procession of decorated automobiles and occa- sional downpourings of rain when we headed the

THROUGH CANADA 75

car in the direction of Montreal. Mr. C ,

a prominent editor and motorist, piloted us westward towards the historic village of Sillery, along that Grande AUee where the alarmed Montcalm had caught his first view of the menacing British red-coats. A Government road is in course of construction which will make a complete circuit of the battlefield and throw open to the motorist some of the superb views across the St. Lawrence. From the monument marking the spot where Wolfe breathed his last, we saw range upon range of hills, softened by distance into the tenderest of blues and gray.

I took a last backward glance at the city. Under the shadow of the citadel red-coated specks moved detachedly across the undulating golf- ground, while the funnels and masts of ocean liners, bearing their precious cargoes of future Canadians, floated silently up-stream. From those gray protecting ramparts went forth how many daring explorers ? La Salle, Marquette, La Verendrye, and the Jesuit martyrs for their faith, Breboeuf and Lallemant ! They were the first explorers and pioneers of that " Country Beyond " towards which I, too, was setting forth. Without trail or path to guide them, the French had made their way from the St. Lawrence to the regions of the Great Lakes in an ever-present desire to find the elusive Mer de V Quest. No matter how far one might penetrate to the West, one could never get beyond the goal which they had attained. With no advantages of roads and settlements, of hotels and the most up-to-date comforts of our modern civilization, they had

76 A MOTOR TOUR

reached the Pacific. To-day the traveller can do no more. Along the route I was to follow, a man could discover nothing upon which their eyes had not looked two centuries before. Com- pared with their horses and canoes and moccasined feet, the instrument to my hand was clumsy and ineffective, demanding its wayshowers and advance men and a thousand and one other evidences of preparation, before it could prove effective. And after all was said and done, there were to be stretches where my machine could not follow in their wake — spots where man is still hermit, symbolizing Tragedy, Solitude, Desolation.

Leaving Sillery, where stands the oldest Mission Church in Canada, the way grew rough with sand and bed-rock, and finally the stone road disappeared and the natural earth road became king.

^ The earth road is the offspring of the trail, and the trail the next-of-kin to the primitive footpath. Savage man built no roads. His wants were few. Hunger drove him in search of food, and the direct way to his sources of supply. Thus, out of the worn tracks of the beast and his savage hunter grew the definite routes of travel. Gradually man's trails were widened so as to admit of the passage of bodies of men on their migrations and the primitive highway was formed. Transformed and adapted to modern requirements, it became the common road of Canada — a thoroughfare of natural soil to which no other surfacing material has been added and with which no binder or filler has been mixed. Ditched and drained, scraped and crowned by means ot the

THROUGH CANADA 77

split-log drag, it can be turned into a perfect motor highway. The drag consists of two logs drawn by horses at an angle of about forty-five degrees to the line of the road. Applied when the road is still wet from rain and the clay is plastic, the crown is built up, the ruts are filled in, and a little sun tends to bake into hardness the entire surface thus plastered over with a thick coating of puddled clay. The earth road is, of course, a poor substitute for macadam, but it Is often superior to the urban stone roads, into which broken stone has been rolled or crushed by con- \y stant traffic without proper scientific preparation or a suitable binder.

By seven o'clock we had reached the little town of St. Anne de la Parade, to which the poet of the "Habitant Country," the late Dr. Drummond, alludes in his quaint verse :

« Ma girl — she's fader beeg farmeur — leev 'noder side St. Flore, . . . Elmire ! she's pass t'ree year on school — St. Anne de la

Parade, An' wen she's tak de firs' class prize, dat's mak' de ole man glad. He say, * Ba gosh, ma girl can wash, can keep de kitchen clean, Den change her dress, mak' politesse before God save de Queen.' "

Here, in the semi-darkness, we unearthed as pilot to the inn, a bright-eyed French boy, with the old-fashioned, knowing ways of his elders and a dirty short pipe stuck rakishly between his juvenile lips. He climbed into the tonneau, settled comfortably into the cushions, and gave the chauffeur instructions between puffs at his rank pipe-stump.

Then he became demoralized. All the boy that was ever in him fled. Judging by his

78 A MOTOR TOUR

airs, he should have worn trousers and been the father of a family, but instead he wore knicker- bockers and socks. The Habitant fireside and the camp had doubtless jointly contributed to lend to the imp an air of nonchalant self-assurance and philosophic ease which was nothing less than starding. He chattered like an old woman. He led the talk and refused to be " squelched." For sheer oddity and mental acuteness, he looked to be capable of outhuckleberrying Huckleberry Finn or any of the matchless boy creations ot Mark Twain.

A modest supper of a joyless, impromptu kind, served in a little room abutting on a ramshackle kitchen by a somewhat subdued look- ing waitress, reminded me that the Habitant has not the deft, culinary gifts of his French counter- part. His inn table is devoid of wines or other attractive beverages, and the art of the savoury omelette is unknown to him. There was a time during the sorry meal when it seemed as though the flies were having rather the better of the contest in securing the viands first, in spite of scores of protective devices and contrivances. The sugar and the butter were valiandy on the defensive beneath glass lids ; the bread had con- trived to slip out of sight evidently too alarmed in that microbic atmosphere to be concerned about human appetites. The jams were reposing in their sticky sloughs under pink gauze awnings ; and the fried eggs — the staple product of the kitchen — only escaped going down the wrong throats by emitting a hot steam very inimical to insect health. The milk was fortunately

THROUGH CANADA 79

covered with paper discs, but a few of the ravenous flies fell into the tea, and their limp corpses had to be fished out of the dangerous concoction.

For the next thirty miles through the darkness to Three Rivers, there was an eerie sense of never being sure of the way. The river was always turning up where one hardly expected to find it ; there were toll bridges to cross of the existence of which one had had no previous intuition ; and there were sandy roads which looked suspiciously as though the car was miles from any proper, self-respecting route. From shadowy houses, there emerged human phantoms offering, in response to the calls from the horn, half-com- prehended directions in the intense gloom of narrow lanes overhung with densely-foliaged trees. Villages, darkened like a thiefs lantern, came momentarily into the ghostly white rays of the car lamps, and then shot back into the world of unseen things, to give place to one of those sinister death-traps of the North American Continent — the unprotected, gateless, railroad crossing. How often, along some of these tracks of gleaming steel, the roaring, hissing engine had darted, unheralded, out of night, to gather its toll of victims and to disappear in a trail of blood ! There it was, at every few miles of our way, the most obnoxiously omnipresent thing on the American Continent — the level railway track — threading the village and the town, crossing the highway and rushing into the path of pedestrian, motorist and driver where steep banks or winding curves shut it out of sight that Death might reap

8o A MOTOR TOUR

his grim harvest ! The one formidable terror and I blot of the Road of Canada and the United ^^ States — an institution so vicious and gross, so opposed to the common acceptation of the sacred- ness of human life, as to place North America in the line of backward, sluggish and criminally- neglectful nations — these crossings form an in- tolerable curse and menace, a juggernaut for human sacrifice.

It seems incredible that the railroads pay no heed to protests.

" Do you know what it means to reconstruct all these level crossings } " say the railroad owners evasively on impeachment. " Do you know that there isn't enough loose money in the country to pay for the alterations, to put a guard at every unprotected point, and to run the road over or below the tracks } Do you know that it would take many decades to carry out these improve- ments ? We are astonished at your thoughtless exactions. Just follow the instructions on the sign-posts and * Stop ! Look 1 Listen 1 ' and you'll be safe enough."

And still the brutal sacrifice of life goes on !

Three Rivers 1 Half-way to Montreal and the core of Drummond's Habitant Country 1

" Vlctoriaw : she have beeg war, Eg)-p's de nam' de place — An neeger peep' dat's leev 'im dere, got very black de face, An' so she's write Joseph Mercier, he's stop on Trois Rivieres — 'Plees come right off, an' bring wit you, t'ree bonder voyageurs.' '

The hotel of the little French town of Trois Rivieres faced the railroad, and what with fresh paint, fresh furnishings, fresh extensions and fresh clerks, was in a state of some confusion

THROUGH CANADA 8i

when I arrived late that evening. The rooms were so many cubicles, looking sadly out on unresponsive dark courts. Big blazing corridor lamps had taken pity on their misery, however, and shot their rays lavishly through the unshaded fanlights above the doors, shockingly oblivious of the common rights of sleep.

The chauffeur and the clerks had gone to bed with that " tired feeling " peculiar to their kind when I strolled through the office into the quiet night of the well-lighted streets. Poor fellows ! Mark Tv/ain I believe it was who pointed out the kinship of work to play if we only understand it aright. If we love our work, it should be only another name for play. Are not the men who ignore the dignity and joy of work bound to be exhausted when the soft, restful shadows of night bring the opportunity for con- templation and the serenity of self-communion ? So long as labour presents to us the Medusa head of arduous toil, we can never be truly happy nor feel refreshed by our exertions.

In a deserted nook of the hotel, I came across a stray volume of Drummond. Within a stone's throw were his types — the passions, sentiments, foibles and tastes, the superstitions and faults of his humble, lovable folk. One felt as one read that everything rang blade-true to the life and character of the French-Canadian.

Drummond himself had been a lovable man. "Play up, and play the game" had been his motto, and he kept all the illusions of life into his late manhood, finding his greatest pleasure in the freedom of the forest, in the trees, the streams,

G

\

82 A MOTOR TOUR

the little birds singing and the " mountains calling to the Spring." Some one has said that " it requires but little talent to set the foibles of a people to metre, but it calls for genius in touch with the lowly and the divine to make a man a poet by the Grace of God." Truly Drummond's salient quality is overflowing sympathy with the people of his adopted Habitant world.

Next day, eight miles out of Three Rivers, owing to my oversight of microscopic directions on a sign-board at a fork, the car found itself / ploughing along to almost certain doom on a ■* roadless road. The highway had given no sign for the first few hundred yards that it was a thing of less than third magnitude ; then it suddenly revealed itself in all its duplicity of character by resolving into a broad sand-bar on end. We were on an old bed of the St. Lawrence generally deserted of man and beast.

I should have counselled, in view of my Quebec experience, instant return to the fork. But instead, the temptation to manufacture adven- ture after nearly 1000 miles of uneventful motor history caused me to inaugurate a systematic course of " breaking in" the car to hills. An audience of school children lurked in the dunes, gleefully commenting on the frantic endeavours of the unlucky machine to rush the summit. Time after time, we had to disappoint the scholastic brood, and the car reached a nicely conjectured point two-thirds up the incline, only to send up a cloud of sandy spindrift from a deep pocket of bottomless sand. The particular theory of sand-hill climbing, according to a chauffeur's

THROUGH CANADA 83

platoon exercises, is that a perfectly even and straight rut must be made up the hill in order to get " way " on the car. The automobile, how- ever, on this occasion, was resolved that for once the theory should not work and resolutely set itself to describing parabolas instead of straight lines. It was all very exhilarating and diverting for the limited audience, but after we had backed down the hill to the foot a dozen times and hurled a ton and a half of metal over and over full force at the sullen sands, the ignominious " Retreat " to the forks was sounded, and we returned, rather frayed in spirit, with all the hectic flush of impending victory and historic adventure vanished into oppressive retrospection.

The sandy roads, grass grown, that followed, kept a respectful distance from the river, and at Louisville, where I stopped to purchase stale films, I enjoyed an elementary kind of revenge against the hill in seeing some men frantically struggling with a bad log jam against the town bridge while half the population looked on anxiously. One could but feel the infinite advantage and satis- faction in the spectator's point of view.

The morning which had started so unbeliev- ably dull and chilly was now getting unbelievably warm, as we skirted the flat shores of the great river or ran along leafy avenues. There was village after village to be traversed, name after name, all in the French vernacular, to be spelled — but not pronounced — there were sheep to be gazed at with curious eyes as the creatures stood yoked in couples in the fields, there were cramped legs to be stretched by a short, sharp constitutional,

84 A MOTOR TOUR

and then at St. Sulpice, hard by the river, the inner gods to be appeased after the tonic air and sun.

St. Sulpice is but one of the minor towns or Johnnie Courteau's bringing up, modest and pro- vincial, and furnishing very little at that hour for the human maw. Foraging in hidden bakeries and a delicatessen shop run to earth in a back alley, brought to light a sprat of a French youth who carved fearful-looking fragments of alimenta- tion with a gigantic knife. We boldly consumed our plunder before a miscellaneous crowd of children attired in thin, bare legs and voluminous bow ties.

All the majesty and the glory had now dis- appeared from the scenery of the St. Lawrence. There was no loftier spectacle than the tall skeleton trelliswork of iron and wood which did duty as lighthouse to guide the steamer traffic across the river flats. The banks were low and monotonous all the way to Montreal, which we approached by a long, tree-shaded road. Before the office of La Patrie a press photographer cleared a ring in the crowd as one might mow a swath in grass, and insisted upon accomplishing a measure of fame for us by the exercise of his *' black art." It was only three o'clock of a lovely afternoon, and there was plenty of time to see the sights en automobile^ to drop in for a chat with the French-speaking Mayor, to settle com- fortably at the lordly hotel, and after the sweet beguilings of tea and music, to steal out of the shadows of lobbies into the amber lights playing on Mount Royal. From that lofty eyrie, over- looking the stately St. Lawrence and the gorgeous

THROUGH CANADA 85

panorama of the settled plains and tinted skies, it was almost startling to recall the words of Voltaire when Montreal capitulated in 1760 to the English and the whole of the known Canada became a possession of the English crown.

" France and England are at war for several acres of snow and are spending on the fight more than the whole of Canada is worth. . . . The country is covered with snow and ice for eight months of the year and is inhabited by barbarians, y^ bears and beavers."

Montrealers will have plenty of opportunity for unique motoring, once their roads are brought up to automobilists' standards. About 1 60 miles away there is Mount Laurier, approached through a region of mountains, pleasant valleys and a vast tangle of lakes and streams which are among the " best trout-fishing waters of America. In the wild ' heart of the region, of which the names recall the voyageur at every step, nature may be seen in all her unadorned grandeur, the Laurentians here affording an illimitable pleasure ground. It is a steep climb up the valley of the Riviere du Nord, the road ever twisting and turning with the sinuosities of the stream and ever opening new vistas of surprising scenic splendour. High hills rise on either side to the rocky summits, and from one point no less than eighteen lakes are in view. Where the Laurentians reach their greatest altitude is the pleasant village of St. Agatha des Monts on Des Sables Lake, destined to become the popular resort of Montrealers during the swelter- ing days of summer.

The tremendous stretch of new suburbs across

ff

>• t^

86

A MOTOR FOUR

the Montreal plains has mde sad havoc of the fine farming land and th rural thoroughfares through which we drove tr :he Ottawa River en route for the capital. Tr. elms of the forked American variety, evidently ent on confusing the observer into a belief that here are more trees there than meet the eye lined the roadways. There was a constant succ^sion of homes and town after town followc \ :^id sequence, to

vanish at last before fici . v/oodlands and a

gentle, shadowy veiled mist trough which only the distant blue hills seemed *' any touch of

realityin the delicate, go a _::;c of creation.

On the outer edge of e Habitant country lay little Bord a PloufFe, " the beautiful Riviere des P mond listened to the quair life and wrote, "The Wrecl the herald of his future fam

" I often think of the 1 rd ii Plouffe days of 1869," he wrote in later life.'* and the first time 1 saw the old place : and en yet memory can summon up the wild gladi^ r . of the ' saw log ' and * square lumber' raft, ad 1 can hear them sing, * Trois beaux canards and * Par derrierc chez ma tantc.' "

the banks of ricb. Here Drum- tales of backwoods )f the Julie Plants,"

"Bord a PJouffe u on '!<- - - htnd a PJfmffc i» ■ An (ic family of i On U)mt houK dty got On tome houtc only »?n But w'crc you An" futh fine )

The unspoiled Habitar decked barns and sloping

Jl aroun*

.'. ith his double- runways to the

'«

':

It i Mi.

86 A MOTOR TOUR

the Montreal plains has made sad havoc of the fine farming land and the rural thoroughfares through which we drove to the Ottawa River en route for the capital. Tall elms of the forked American variety, evidently bent on confusing the observer into a belief that there are more trees there than meet the eye, lined the roadways. There was a constant succession of homes and town after town followed in rapid sequence, to vanish at last before fields and woodlands and a gentle, shadowy veiled mist through which only the distant blue hills seemed to preserve any touch of reality in the delicate, gossamer scheme of creation.

On the outer edge of the Habitant country lay little Bord a Ploufre, hugging the banks of the beautiful Riviere des Prairies. Here Drum- mond listened to the quaint tales of backwoods life and wrote, "The Wreck of the Julie Plants," the herald of his future fame.

" I often think of the Bord a PloufFe days of 1869," he wrote in later life, " and the first time 1 saw the old place : and even yet memory can summon up the wild gladiators of the ' saw log ' and * square lumber ' raft, and I can hear them sing, * Trois beaux canards,' and * Par derriere chez ma tante.' "

" Bord a Plouffe is on de reever, Bord a PloufFe is on de shore. An' de family of PloufFe dere all aroun*. On some house dey got twenty, On some house only ten.

But w'ere you get such girl

An' such fine young men ? '

The unspoiled Habitant, with his double- decked barns and sloping runways to the

THROUGH CANADA 87

upper floor, his huge wooden threshing wheels, his wayside calvaries, and his quaint open-air ^ y ovens, will form some of the choicest souvenirs of a motor tour through Canada. In a sense he is of a type more unique and individual than is to be found anywhere else in Canada beside the highway, while the particular phase which he presents to the sympathetic observer from the tonneau makes for charitable tolerance and a readjustment of European standards regarding the conventional American pioneer.

As I bade farewell to the light-hearted, con- tented " Pierre and His People," I wondered how the Habitant — who appeared to have reached Finality — would compare with those new-comers, owners of the West which I was approaching, who will let neither mountain nor prairie sleep, who are alive with fundamental action, who cannot rest, who cannot wait.

CHAPTER V

Z' ■ ^HE day was dull but warm. The ■ roads were in their worst, their most

V brutal mood — they were macabe.

1

Before their grim realities of mud and rut, conversation was soon reduced to the bluntest of monosyllables. The way was soggy with constant rains, and one could easily imagine that the swallows had not only failed to make a summer, but had been compelled to fly so low as even to prefer walking.

As better roads had been promised on the Ontario shores of the broad Ottawa River, we steered a course close to the beautiful Lake of the Two Mountains in order to strike the river at the Carillon Ferry, and cross to Pointe Fortune. The stream swept nobly between forest-tipped promontories, bursting into a musical roar where the Rapids of Carillon filled the broad bed with long lines of foam-crested waves. Champlain had ascended to this point in canoes in 1613. He had the task of exploring the unknown river and of disproving a known liar — a lieutenant of his expedition whom he had despatched up the river a year or two before. The young man declared that he had followed its course to the northern seas.

88

THROUGH CANADA 89

The wonder is that Champlain should have discredited the story — not that the young man should have given circulation to it. The "Wild '* has always had a strange tendency to tempt the white explorer to wander from the strict path of verbal rectitude. It is thus easy to imagine how the first travel story was invented. The certainty of not being contradicted in one's data by con- temporary observation galvanized the imagination of most early explorers, and spiced their versions with the qualities of genuine, hair-raising narra- tive. Thus, the Spanish soldier-pioneers in the American wilderness " discovered " Cities of Gold, nations of advanced civilization and untold wealth, and mountains shining with precious metals. They had tales of lands and physical marvels that far transcended all previous conception, that leaped stark out of the waters of everyday facts and set men breaking loose from human ties in quest of the fatuous creation of the Liar. The amber-coloured literature of the Seven Cities of Cibola and of the mystic Everglades proves that melancholy fact up to the hilt.

Had Champlain been born in our time, he would not have treated his lieutenant with such uncompromising harshness. The man who boldly sets forth to explore the fastnesses of the Rockies in search of " shining mountains," or the fertile lands of the northern plains that will enrich his fellow-men, is usually rewarded by an implicit faith and trust which puts men like Champlain and Coronado to shame. Once they have re- turned to civilization, there is nothing too great to be done for them. Nor do we show the

90 A MOTOR TOUR

unmitigated greed of the Spanish adventurers in demanding a whole city of glittering streets and golden walls. Let him but find a small hole in the ground filled with the precious metal, our gratitude knows no bounds. The story of the find is gratefully and eagerly read in thousands of homes and in many countries. Money pours in upon the promoter-discoverer. We deluge him with it. We steal for him. We sacrifice our happiness, and we risk our souls for him. Often we give up our life and the lives of some of our dear ones for him that the world shall not say that we are ungrateful.

A gasoline ferry boat, owned, engineered, and manned by a contemplative beetle-browed Scotch- man with such deep-sunken shrewd blue eyes as to convey the alarming impression that he was doing the thinking for the entire country, awaited us at the crossing. After ripping the silence of the sleepy world with a shrill blast of the whistle, he put off leisurely into the current, head on to the distant rapids. Imminent and unavoidable destruction stared us in the face, but still the skipper thought on, his hoary, begrimed head sticking motionless out of the stoke-hole. One had the assurance that he was steering the ship by hard thinking, and that when the right moment came he would think a little harder in order to bring her round and swing her inshore on the strong current.

And that is exactly what did happen.

A curious little bob-tailed motor-car, which had disputed places on the ferry with us, and a frisky, fly-blown horse, essayed to make the

THROUGH CANADA 91

amende honorable by striking up an acquaintance with the dignified, lordly-looking transcontinental car. Its occupants were hatless and coatless, and, in company with a mysterious flask of handy pro- portions, were having a hilarious time. How long we might have been able to resist the de- moralizing temptations and inuendoes directed at us from the tonneau of that disreputable-looking car I do not know. We gave it no encouragement in its advances, and, no sooner landed and cranked up, it happily shot off like a streak westward and disappeared down the road.

Our way traversed a pretty farming country. But the livestock of the farms was mostly in the centre of the road. It awaited our coming and necessitated a great deal of skilful manoeuvring to avoid self-immolation by chickens, dogs, and ducks, and much descriptive phraseology, for humane reasons, from the irate driver. One lonely chick paid the death penalty for hugging shelter in a rut ; a hen crawled away with a sickening, sidelong lurch ; a valuable collie dog, hurling itself with fury at the revolving wheels, was caught by an incautious foot and maimed ; another charging dog screamed with rage when axle and pan passed over his rolling form as a hurricane over grass ; and still another limped away yelping. Now and again, however, one's faith in the Road God, lost for the moment, would come joyously back as a dog, rushing along in a parallel course with our flight, chal- lenged us to a race until the indicator of the • speedometer was somewhere among the thirties. ^ Then, caught by a stump or other obstruction, a

92 A MOTOR TOUR

sudden somersault would arrest his mad career, and he would make his way back, crestfallen. Desire for a race is the real key to the challenge of the idle road dog in nine cases out of ten, and his apparently fierce rage at the swiftly-revolving wheel is only a canine way of telling us what a true sportsman he is.

Horses, however, showed their familiar ten- ^ dency to treat us as enemies of their race, and one, big of bone and doubtful of temper, caused all but one of the women occupants of a passing buggy to scramble down to safety. We alighted, stopped the engines, apologized, offered to lead the animal past. But the heroine of the reins boldly declined the offer, and the next moment she lay against a big boulder in the grassy ditch with wild beseeching eyes and blanched cheeks.

For a moment we had visions of a tragedy of the road for which we might be held responsible by the men who hurried to the scene from near-by fields. However, All's well that ends well ! The woman, in spite of her pain, ex- onerated the anxious motorists from all blame, and we left her and her companions to the care of the sympathetic farmers.

The flatness of the country and the sandy nature of the road-bed showed that we were crossing land which had once formed the broad flats of the river, though the Ottawa was no longer in sight. The sand, while it assured us y dry-going, gave a constant swaying to the car that was by no means diverting. The motion was ridiculous and it made one feel strangely

THROUGH CANADA 93

helpless and hapless. No matter how fast or how slowly the machine moved, the swaying and jiggling were ever there, to spoil a sentence, and finally to render any form of thinking a severe mental effort. One felt like getting out, search- ing for the demon of mischief which had " possessed " the sand and then mercilessly laying him out flat under the wheels. But the fatuous impulse to destroy intangible things merely indi- cated the lamentable mental state to which an hour or so of such unearthly locomotion can reduce one.

When sanity and good roads returned, the sun was dead ahead, flashing on the glass of the wind-shield, shining like copper on the road- way, and so dazzling the eyes as to make steering difficult. We scouted for shelter and found it in welcome abundance whenever the road traversed long patches of woodland. In one of these shady stretches, we came to the one-thousandth " mile- stone " of the tour, but this statement must by no means be taken literally since we had to trust to the odometer for the mileage record. Mile- stones in fact had been conspicuous by their absence. A mile in Canada is never officially recorded by the roadside ; hence its length varies, depending upon the imagination of the inhabitants for approximate accuracy. iEsop's conception that the time it would take to cover a certain distance between two points is conditional upon the speed at which one walks, is not by any means applicable in Canada, as I found to my cost. Men were neither able to judge accurately of motor speeds nor of geographical distances. In the farmers'

/

94 A MOTOR TOUR

and storekeepers' judgments of a mile, there was as much variation as there is between an English and a German mile. " A mile further on " would

^ sometimes mean "five miles," and "five miles" might mean " ten " or perhaps " three." The odometer, in fact, showed that nine people out of ten of whom we inquired the way, were hopelessly ^ at sixes and sevens on distance. This had been especially true of the French communities, of which we had now begun to lose sight, although the presence of Catholic churches suggested a countryside once populated by the French- Canadian who had fled before a British invasion.

At some early hour in the afternoon we had passed the occupants of the bob-tailed car dis- cussing the contents of the aromatic flask by the roadside, with impromptu luncheon-tables devised out of tonneau cushion and suit-case. Of course we sped by with the sense of embarrassment which seizes the luckless caller at meal times. By what , devious or direct route they managed to travel,

' after their al fresco meal had been consumed, and got ahead of us is not quite clear. Issuing from

>/' out a ganglionic tangle of bypaths into the broad stream of the main highway was the bob-tailed

vicar's unmistakable spoor. Fate would have it, too, that we should run the disreputable-looking creature to earth at some confusing cross-roads. A broad grin of triumph played about the features of the driver when we asked him for directions. We tried to look supremely indiff^erent, but as we moved off one of the men called out —

" By the way, was you the fellers that run down the woman back there on the road ? "

THROUGH CANADA 95

Frigid silence for a moment or two. Then, casually —

" Why ? "

"Becoz if you was, they tried to put the thing on to us and have our scalps. So we quit, and we're quittin' still."

And the fly-blown car, not sure yet of being in sanctuary, shot off again.

Our haven appeared at last at the end of a good broad earth road, a breeze from the east bowling us along to the Capital with the sensation of all sails being spread to the wind.

Ottawa, the obscure village of a few years ago, and now an apparently endless maze of brick and stone, of railroad tracks, of public buildings and shops, was enthroned above the crags of a gloriously picturesque river. One instinctively compared it with Washington or with London, only to be baffled in the attempt to find an analogy. Perhaps the comparison with Buda Pesth is nearer the mark. The Canadian Houses of Parliament which dominate Ottawa, have that touch of the wild and barbaric in their archi- tectural composition which lends a distinctive note to the Hungarian pile. In both buildings there is a suggestion of the bizarre, of a founda- tion upon rude beginnings by a race grown from / childhood through strenuous ways to greatness. Ottawa is neither fish, flesh, fowl nor bone, but it is compounded of all four. It is neither a mean nor a great city. At one moment you seem to be standing in the heart of a metropolis, at another to be looking at a second-rate pro- vincial town. But it has tremendous standards

V

96 A MOTOR TOUR

to live up to ; you feel at every turn that it is trying to be equal to the destiny of which it is so conscious. The new hotel which received me under its palatial roof, named after one of the makers of modern Canada, was not a hotel in the ordinary acceptation of the term. It was a great city adornment ; it was a national, if not an imperial achievement. Close by were shops which for smartness would sit well on Fifth Avenue or in Piccadilly, but they were essentially the'product of a well-understood and easily recog- nized commercial spirit. But, compared with them, the hotel was a monument which, look at it in any way you pleased, seemed to proclaim that the Canada of to-day would be the nation of to-morrow.

A plain and unpretentious road takes the motorist a short distance out of Ottawa along the water's edge to a rather ordinary-looking private estate, with a long driveway through an avenue of maples to the modest-looking home of the man who nominally stands at the head of the country in the name of King and Empire — the Governor-General. One is instantly attracted by the simplicity and the appropriateness of the setting. Rideau Hall hovers over the city — it is not within its gates. It is a gentleman's country estate, such as I had seen at Quebec. Doubtless conscious of its significance, it leaves the limelight and the glory for the country whose destinies it is beneficently watching and guarding. But to those who have eyes to see, England is unmis- takably incorporated in those few acres — the England, I mean, of homes and family life, of

^%r^^"ynNi^^'^-t^# ;if.« • i

iMM^iMt

"lit i f "

^^ . t i

n/

96 A MOTCl TOUR

to live up to ; you feel X every turn that trying to be equal to tl destiny of which : so conscious. The new otel which received under its palatial roof, amcd after one of t makers of modern Can la, was not a hotel the ordinary acceptation )f the term. It was great city adornment ; ii /as a national, if not ai imperial achievement. Close by were shops^ which for smartness \^ jld sit well on Fifth Avenue or in Piccadilly, ut they were essentially the'product of a well-un< rstood and easily recog- nized commercial spiri' But, compared with them, the hotel was a r nument which, look at it in any way you plea d, seemed to proclaim that the Canada of to-da would be the nation of to-morrow.

A plain and unpre ntious road takes the motorist a short distance »ut of Ottawa along the water's edge to a rather rdinary-looking private estate, with a long driv 7ay through an avenue of maples to the mode -looking home of the man who nominally sti ds at the head of^I country in the name ' King and Ei the Governor-General. )ne is instani by the simplicity and th a^Yropni setting. Rideau Hall h 'ers ov( not within its gates. It j a estate, such as I had see) conscious of its signific; and the glory for the is beneficently watch| those who have eyej takably incorporat< England, I mean^

•aaaMiMar^b^^

' jfe/ ^?tmf m M sr/l^

4k ^^M <.

7 • 9U

THROUGH CANADA 97

hospitality and sane living, the England whose tables groan under the produce of her industrious children, who beautifies her homes with gardens and parks, and who with her marvellous genius for landscape effect, can turn an entire country into a lordly domain and touch it into beauty until it is drenched and drugged and a-drunk with it.

Rideau Hall stands alone in the heart of Canada as an expression of that proverbial home- love of the Englishman ! But the Hall typifies also that fatal gift of beauty which has contributed towards England's industrial undoing, which has taken the land of her yeomen, the fields of the husbandmen, the pastures of the shepherd, the lanes of the country-folk, the hedges and the trees, the woods and the coppice, the waving fields of wheat, the lowly villages and the public commons, and, in the taking of them that they might be transmuted into loveliness by the fairy wand, has forgotten man and his needs, his birthright in the soil, his duty to till and to own it ! England has driven her disinherited, disillusionized, pauper sons to the city from the land that was theirs by the right of God, that the property of the Many may be held by the Few, and become the play- ground of the unproductive Rich !

But out of the wreck of the island nation have sprung the transformed colonies — the Dominions. Out of the hydra-headed evil has come the good which is to see the disinherited in possession of their own again. Canada, one of the God-sent preservers of the race, is an evidence that England is alive to the dangers which she has voluntarily

H

98 A MOTOR TOUR

brought upon herself, is an integral part of a beneficent scheme of Providence which is to save England from a well-deserved fate ere it is too late. The feudal system of the French-Canadian swept away, a never-ending army of men is sweep- ing through the wide-open portals of freedom back to the land of their inalienable birthright.

If the city and all that it stands for has a fascinating interest for the motorist, a run along the river shores to the Falls of Chaudiere, and the huge lumber mills which make up the picturesque life of the Ottawa, will hold him in a spell of enchantment. Here one comes into intimate touch with the life of the lumber-jack and gazes upon the gigantic log booms and rafts which have brought the spoils of the forest to their last rest- ing-place. The mills buzz day and night in an apparently frantic desire to reduce the giants of the woods to things of every-day utility. Those logs have reached the saw mills as if by a miracle. Driving logs is an arduous and dangerous occupa- tion, and a lumber-jack must be able to navigate them as if he were guiding a canoe, while all around him there may be hundreds of tumbling, scrambling tree trunks tearing in open revolution a passage for themselves, fighting and swirling, rushing and halting, twisting and squirming, smashing and grinding, jamming and ramming and cleaving a way for themselves in the angry current to their shambles, while the waters exultingly bear the mighty giants to their igno- minious doom.

One pictures, in fascinated horror, that war- fare of the waters and the forest — the forest,

THROUGH CANADA 99

doomed, putting up a majestic chaotic fight, not for liberty, not for restoration to the primeval glades, but for the sake of that spirit which we recognize in men as " dying hard." They call for no quarter and give none. One pictures, too, those crises in the life of the lumber- jack when the whole mass of floating logs has turned side on to the stream against a sullen rock, and he must get in among them and at the risk of his life release the key-log with his cant- hook. There must be moments in his life when even he is appalled by the great swelling noises of the fiends of wood and gorge and canyon and cataract, when he and his fellow-jacks have wantonly cast all the worst forces of Hell together ; when death comes bearing relentlessly down upon him in the surging, tumbling, roaring billows and there is no apparent avenue of escape.

The saw mills set up a scene of lively human activity. Logs were being hauled up to their death out of the mill pond along an inclined plane, and inside a gang-saw rushed back and forth at them as they fell into place by means of huge hooks instinct with the judgment and niceties of the human hand. The eye was riveted with horror by that deadly gang-saw. In it was concentrated the evil genius of the place. It was the ultimate expression of the civilization which had invaded and doomed the forest. Re- morseless in its ceaseless butchery, the stately tree became twain, became quadrupled, and then, losing all character and relationship to the primeval forest, was flung aside as boards,

loo A MOTOR TOUR

as planks, as sawn timber. The long edgings of the boards were thrust down a hopper as fast as cut off and, ignominlously ground up, their existence came to an end. And all the time, there was an incessant clamour and cry, a shrill hissing note, piercing the diapason of the saws.

The huge hotel was almost empty at this season. But Parliament was not in session, otherwise the noble entrance lobby would have been filled with Fashion and chattering groups of Parliamentarians discussing in French and English over fragrant Havanas the merits and demerits of Borden's Imperial Policy or the rights and wrongs of Reciprocity.

Late that afternoon I strolled into the hotel tea-room and ordered tea from a daintily- aproned maid. Two young ladies, with large picture hats, Empire walking dresses low at the throat, and feather boas thrown back on their shoulders, sat at an adjoining table, exchanging confidences with each other and with fearfully and wonderfully named American ice-creams.

Tea arrived, accompanied by a filmy row of all but invisible slices of bread-and-butter. I looked quizzically at the liquid in my cup as I set down the teapot. Then I tasted it.

" Pardon me, is this tea ^ " I asked gently, not wishing to hurt the feelings of the maid.

" Yes ! " There was plenty of confidence in the voice. Not an eyelash wavered.

"Ah!"

A pause. "Pardon me, did I understand you aright } This is tea ? "

"Certainly ! You ordered tea."

THROUGH CANADA loi

" I thought perhaps I had made a mistake — that perhaps I had ordered — er — something else."

« No, sir ! "

" Ah 1 Then if this is tea, will you be so kind as to bring me some coffee ? "

" We can't exchange it now that you have been drinking it."

" Of course not. But never mind " (this magnanimously) : " charge it to me, and let me have some coffee."

"Very well."

In due season the coffee appeared. I tasted it.

" Pardon me ! "

The maid turned again with a bored expression.

"Is this coffee ? "

" Certainly." She bit her lip in an effort to disguise her impatience.

A pause, in which 1 tasted the concoction again cautiously. Then, " Excuse me, did I understand aright ? This is coffee ? "

" You ordered coffee."

" Yes ! And I ordered tea, but it wasn't tea, any more than this is coffee. I believe I'll have the tea back. Or — no! Bring me nothing at all, and I'll pay for it. You needn't complain to the cook. There's been some terrible mistake. No, no 1 I won't take chocolate — only the bill. But I'd like to know what trade the cook has hitherto followed, or whether they run a drug-store in the kitchen, or boil the fish in the tea-kettles, or what. For you've surely been giving a close imitation /^ of cod-liver oil instead of coffee or tea."

In the restaurant I incautiously drank some of the table water. I got as far with the waiter

102 A MOTOR TOUR

^ as " Excuse me, is this water ? " and then cut things short and walked out to try another restaurant. I vowed I wouldn't touch water and ordered soup. The first spoonful arrested me. I refused to ask if it were soup, but called the head-waiter, apologized, said I'd made a mistake, paid the bill, walked out and stopped a policeman and asked him what in the name of thunder was the matter with Ottawa.

The policeman eyed me knowingly with the look of a man who had sized up the situation, then sniffed.

"You've been drinking the water, haven't you ? " He seemed to be glaring angrily, re- proachfully, at me.

" Yes — at least — coffee — tea — soup "

The man nodded significantly and drew out his note-book. " Here, take this card, which admits you for free treatment at the expense of the city till cured. You smell, sir, most objection- ably of chloride of lime. It's most fortunate that you did not arrive to-morrow instead of to-day."

« Why .? "

" Because to-morrow the by-law comes into force whereby any one drinking or bathing in Ottawa water for the next two years, or giving or causing to be given Ottawa water, will be liable to the extreme penalty of the law. You have only escaped imprisonment by the skin of your teeth. I must take your name and address, and you must then come along with me to the City Hall, where you will have to take an oath pledging yourself not to say anything of what has happened to you in Ottawa."

THROUGH CANADA 103

" But the water ? "

" Oh ! That's tainted. Fact is they've got the sewage mixed up with it, and we've lost quite a * bunch ' of the population. We're hoping to get the whip hand over it by treating the water with chloride of lime ! You'll be well cared for, sir, in the hospital."

CHAPTER VII

THANKS to the Bay of Fundy and the Forty-Ninth Parallel, I had been unable to take a direct westerly course except during the run between Montreal and Ottawa. I now found that I could not get to Lake Superior and the Prairies except by proceeding south to Lake Ontario. To reach the point nearest Lake Superior where I could again turn westward, I must dip down and curve up, following the course of a letter U. At the end of the U lay North Bay. After reaching that point, my route would depend upon the final advices of local road authorities.

A two days' run from the Capital to Toronto took us through a prosperous farming region. There was almost no uncleared land, but there were hedges and small gardens to give the big farm houses and barns a picturesque setting, ruddy-faced children, ruddy-faced men and women milking black and white cows, roadside platforms on which stood milk-cans ready for the market, wells from which water was drawn by weighted beams — the "shaduf" of Egypt and Biblical days — huge steel-frame wind-mills n/ for pumping, and fine, straight macadam and dirt roads bordered with green grass, short and

104

THROUGH CANADA 105

even as a lawn. Wherever there was a par- ticularly good road or bridge, however, one had to pay toll, sometimes as much as twenty-five y cents. It would have been only fair had the authorities in their turn paid us whenever we had to travel a bad stretch of highway. But they never did. Instead, on one occasion, the absence of a bridge caused us to wallow through yards of mud and water and to almost break the car in deep ruts, from which we finally escaped with the aid of mud-hooks — a diabolical con- trivance attached to the rear wheels whereby the machine jerked itself violently to safety.

As in France, much of the landscape was festooned by the plume-like Lombardy poplars. In the hedges golden rod with its long yellow tassels, corn flower, and Joe Pie plant were universal.

" The golden rod is yellow,

The corn is turning brown ; The trees in apple orchards With fruit are bending down 5 "

hummed the chauffeur, unearthing from his memory a snatch of an old school ditty.

Close to Kingston, I caught my first glimpse of that picturesque touring ground of the Yankee and Canadian, the Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence. According to a legend of the Algon- quins and the Iroquois, the Garden of Eden, after the Expulsion, was borne away by white- winged angels to the eternal spheres, and in transit the most exquisite flowers fluttered down to lie on the blue waters of Lake Ontario. The more prosaic white man has named these floating

io6 A MOTOR TOUR

island-flowers after his own fashion : " Three Brothers," " Three Sisters," "Whiskey Island," and the like. Some of the sixteen hundred and ninety-two are mere tufts of rock and vegetation. Others are devoid of all growth and too small to be dignified by name. Many have never been tamed or currycombed, but bristle with firs and pines. Others spread out into broad, cultivated acres, and many belong to individual farmers who are lords of all they survey. Handsome residences abound, occasionally little bridges connect the buttressed banks of the islets, and large wooden caravanserais — the flimsy American type of hotel, with broad verandahs and steep, American prices — appear at every turn of these wooded and cool, crystalline water-ways.

Famous historical highways, associated more or less with the incidents of the war of 1812, brought us to Toronto in heat and sunshine — an atmosphere echoed in the heartiness of its welcome.

Torontians — or Toronters — are fond of call- ing their city the Boston of Canada, offering its chastening graces to Montreal or Winnipeg. Its advantages and its examples are fortuitous and casual, arising mainly out of the accident of topography, which has placed it where it catches every breeze that blows out of the intellectual world, every prima donna who sings in New York or Chicago, every impresario and piano prodigy, and all the tourist hordes of Niagara and the Lakes. English theatrical companies, starring in America, find it easy to give in Toronto a one-night stand or a week's repertory

THROUGH CANADA 107

from Buffalo, while European lecturers can no more escape Toronto than can Toronto escape Lake Ontario. Montreal catches only the drift- wood, though it be the premier city of Canada ; Ottawa and Quebec languish more or less in Cinderella neglect. Hence, Toronto's day- dreams of distinction ; hence, its clubs and its cosmopolitan crowds ; its affable tolerance of y genius, art, and architecture ! Hence its glitter- ing white skyscrapers that are beginning to make a respectable showing from the water-front 1 Hence its fine self-approval and its flattering discovery of that wonderful thing — itself! — which it has been able to conjure out of a once unhealthy marsh.

" It lies too low — just where a city should never have been built," a prominent architect confided to me sadly at the Arts and Letters Club over an excellent home-cooked club luncheon.

" His minor key is a tribute to the rheuma- tism which is the price of his hours in the city office," explained the third member of the party, a Toronto editor, in a stage aside.

" It is wonderful what a few days in the country will do for a Toronter, however," said the architect, falling into the trap, " The wilder- ness is so close that we can easily get out into that world of freedom and the sunshine of the hill-tops. Even England may envy us a dog, a gun, and a canoe in the primitive wild."

Toronto was a delight and a puzzle. Some / people term it a western city, but there are others who class it as of the east easterly. Does it not

7

io8

A MOTOR TOUR

reckon in cents, a thing no western city ha ever been known to do ? Do not its people usi street cars instead of walking ? Is it not a cit^ of brick rather than of wood ? All these, perhaps are incontrovertible proofs to some of its easteri character. But over and above them there ar the hundred and one familiar signs, reminiscen of New York or of London, which are constantl; recurring to the traveller. The man who heh up my car on the street corners was the Londo; "bobby," regulating traffic in London style- helmeted, chin-strapped, silent, tall and clean-cui Though he wore a thin, red stripe down hi trouser legs and had neat American boots instea of the clumsy Blucher, it was the same man wh holds up an avalanche of motor 'buses and cab at the Mansion House, the same obliging servan of the public and well-ordered cog in th machinery of civic life. There were America popular restaurants and there were the America street cars modified only by the practical " Pa) as-you-enter " system peculiar to Canada. Ther were English waiters in the big hotels, whic were otherwise run on exactly the same syster as obtains at New York. There were New Yor stores with Britons managing them. ^ The tranj ported Briton was everywhere, but with rnuch c his identity lost, working as porter, serving m my cigars, my newspapers, selling me my cravat: cleaning out the stores, driving the motor car and doing the clerical work. But the English woman had scarcely a place in Toronto life. I her place stood a woman more or less a countei part of the Eternal Feminine over the boundary lin

V 1^ wm

'^f^4'f^'\

r< «r

'J*J^J"

f ,'^

rr

:Trie —

::steai

iTint

lerian.

Taich.

THROUGH CANADA

109

— a white-shirt waisted, bargain-counter haunting, street-car patronizing, hurrying, well-developed, non-sentimentalizingr Anglo-Canadian blend of

CD

womanhood. Well-dressed, with some of the Englishwoman's colouring and little of her tender voice, placing emphasis rather on good taste and good manners than on delicate shades of refine- ment, there she was, not a creature of fine bouquet, not a devotee of the outdoor life, but well-set-up and with so much gained to compensate \/ her for the little that she had lost.

Here for the first time one observed those subtle changes which are wrought by environment in giving birth to a new nationality out of the remnants of the old. Before my eyes there was being enacted the supreme tragedy of the passing of a race, long familiar to me by kinship, and its recreation into a type that was all but unrecog- nizable. The life of Toronto thus became a show of surpassing interest, calling me again and again into the highways and byways that I might watch once more the motley cosmopolitanism which made up the manners, dress, art and every- day occupations and habits of the citizen.

The regulation of the traffic in each of the Canadian cities through which I had passed varied according to the Province. In the Maritime Provinces the general rule had been to drive to the left ; in Quebec we had several narrow escapes from accident owing to the change from left to right. We had no sooner accustomed ourselves to this Continental method than we heard that a change would be necessary out West, where British Columbia, with true fidelity to the rule of

io8 A MOTOR TOUR

reckon in cents, a thing no western city has ever been known to do ? Do not its people use street cars instead of walking ? s ,t not a c.ty of brick rather than of wood > All thje Perhaps are incontrovertible proofs to ^"""f "^ '« ^^f^^"^ character. But over and above them there a e the hundred and one famil.ar signs, remm seen

"^^'-^t^Nret^r-'TrnTarwrhis

^T^yTar'ntreft'^^rnerswas the London "bobby," regulating traffic in London style- heteted. chilstrap^ed, silent tall and c!ean-cu , Though he wore a thin, red stnpe do"" h'^ i trouser legs and had neat American boots instead , of the clumsy Blucher, it was the same man who! holds up an avalanche of motor buses and cab , at he Mansion House, the same obliging servan of the public and well-ordered cog m the machinery of civic life. There were American! popular restaurants and there were the America.. , Streetcars modified only by the practical Pay-> ^ as-vou-enter " system peculiar to Canada. 1 here , were English waiters in the big hotels, which we e otherwise run on exactly the same systen- Ts obtains at New York. There were New ^ ork stores with Britons managing them. The trans ported Briton was everywhere, but with much o L identity lost, working as porter serving m mv cigars, my newspapers, selling me my cravats Se'^ning out the stores, driving the motor can and dofng the clerical work. But the English Ionian hfd scarcely a place in Toronto life. 1. her place stood a woman more or less a counter part of the Eternal Feminine over the boundary Im.

THROUGH CANADA 109

— a white-shirt waisted, bargain-counter haunting, street-car patronizing, hurrying, well-developed, non-sentimentalizing Anglo-Canadian blend of womanhood. Well-dressed, with some of the Englishwoman's colouring and little of her tender voice, placing emphasis rather on good taste and good manners than on delicate shades of refine- ment, there she was, not a creature of fine bouquet, not a devotee of the outdoor life, but well-set-up and with so much gained to compensate her for the little that she had lost.

Here for the first time one observed those subtle changes which are wrought by environment in giving birth to a new nationality out of the remnants of the old. Before my eyes there was being enacted the supreme tragedy of the passing of a race, long familiar to me by kinship, and its recreation into a type that was all but unrecog- nizable. The life of Toronto thus became a show of surpassing interest, calling me again and again into the highways and byways that I might watch once more the motley cosmopolitanism which made up the manners, dress, art and every- day occupations and habits of the citizen.

The regulation of the traffic in each of the Canadian cities through which I had passed varied according to the Province. In the Maritime Provinces the general rule had been to drive to the left ; in Quebec we had several narrow escapes from accident owing to the change from left to right. We had no sooner accustomed ourselves to this Continental method than we heard that a change would be necessary out West, where British Columbia, with true fidelity to the rule of

no A MOTOR TOUR

the road of the Mother Country, still drives to the left. Italy, owing to the former existence of the Papal States, has a similar confusion of left and right-hand driving. That Canada has not one uniform law concerning this Important matter astonished me. Here Is surely a subject for immediate attention of the Dominion Govern- ment. Whichever method of driving is adopted does not matter so long as uniformity Is secured. The position of the driver's seat on the right- hand side of a vehicle will, no doubt, create an overwhelming weight of opinion In favour of left- hand passing. The driver can thus accurately measure the amount of his clearance when passing another vehicle coming In the opposite direction, and after all, perhaps, the common-sense of our forefathers, both pedestrian and equestrian, ought to be taken into consideration before Canadians commit themselves one way or the other. With them the man who passed to the left had his right hand free to shake the right hand of the other without turning, while his sword hilt could not be grabbed by a possible opponent. To-day left-hand passing has fewer advocates than the rival method, but there is certainly a preponder- ance of common-sense and practicality in its favour as much as there ever was.

At the busy cross-streets It was usual to signal to the policeman which way you intended to turn, whereupon he would wave you " All Right." As a rule one had to pull up at the kerb headed in the direction of the traffic. Cutting in without turning was not allowed. Thus all standing vehicles faced one way, and not both ways as in

/

THROUGH CANADA in

London. To turn, we were usually obliged to go to the end of the block, that is, to the next street corner ahead. It was also forbidden in certain towns to pass a street car when it had drawn up to let passengers alight, to use the big acetylene lamps or to blow other than the bulb horn. Of course there were exceptions to these rules, and various minor regulations have escaped me. ** Smoking " of the exhaust and the use of the open muffler, which might have been tabooed as intolerable nuisances, were in most towns passed over. But on the whole, there was a marked tendency in Canada to inflict all kinds of penalties for street nuisances. On the bridges were the warning signs : " Not faster than a walk / or $ioo fine 1 " or "Walk across or $25 fine 1 " and so on. Some of these model bridges were new, and it seemed odd to find them plastered with warnings tacitly implicating the country in a policy of fragile bridge construction obviously inadequate and dangerous when utilized for existing traffic needs.

Toronto proved an ideal resting-place in pre- paration for the wilderness which awaited me to the north of the Muskoka Lakes. Over the post- prandial coffee and cigars the hours slipped pleasantly by in congenial chat with fellow motorists, while the daytime had its equally congenial tasks in calls upon the Mayor and the government officials. Yet I was not loath to leave behind me the crowded city ways and give ear to the call of that west whose verge was still hundreds of miles away. Moreover, Toronto, like Ottawa and Montreal, had for some reason,

112 A MOTOR TOUR

which at first was not clear, proved disappointing. Gradually it dawned upon me that I was still seeing Canada as it had presented itself to me years before out of the vague pages of my child- hood school-books.

That had been a cold, bleak Canada of snows and ice palaces and grim, frozen dwell- ings. Issuing from them were strange, ruddy beings enveloped in woollen sweaters, woollen night-caps, woollen knickerbockers, woollen leg- gings and woollen shoes to which were hanging huge, basket-like soles. Apparently they had no fires, and wore these woollens by day and slept in them by night, because the country was so cold, and because the woollens were striped in colours and were very pretty. The people had smoky breaths, and they were always pouring out something hot to drink, or they were picking up big handfulls of snow and madly rubbing each others noses or ears with it when they quarrelled. They never walked singly or in rows, but always in files, which would wind out of one front door of the frozen houses and along the street and over the nearest snow hill and then through the tall firs back to the front door again, each member of the file wearing queer web-footed things like lawn-tennis racquets. When a woman wanted to go shopping she put on the racquets, went to the door, and took her place in the long line of women all attired in the same night-caps and all bent upon shopping at the identical moment. I could see the whole of that procession in the pictures marching down the street, swerving at the corners, bending on itself, crossing and

THROUGH CANADA 113

recrossing, echeloning, right-about-turning, twist- ing and reversing, never getting tangled with any other procession, and all keeping step and all looking straight at me out of the picture. That was the strange thing about these people, that they never looked at any one else but me, just as though they were asking my approval and nothing else mattered. They all had exactly the same kind of features. I tried to find an ugly or a thin person, or one that had different coloured hair from the rest. But in vain. They were all very handsome, and all had jet-black hair, and all were of the same height and weight. At night they carried torches, and then one would see, in addition to the files of men and women, long processions of sleighs with horses covered with bells and plumes. But nobody ever seemed to go to the theatre or the churches or the spelling- bees of those days or the saloons — only to the forest.

By-and-bye I saw a theatrical poster on a wall in my native city displaying an ice palace built like a feudal castle with a long file of bewoollened men and women on the battlements and winding down through the front portal and under the portcullis and over the drawbridge and across the middle distance until it suddenly ended in a man, as large as life with steaming breath and handsome clean-shaven face, looking at me. There were skates on his feet instead of racquets.

It was the Canadian champion ice-skater !

Cautiously, hesitatingly, I crept to the upper balcony of that theatre. I was glad I was going up high where the lights were usually low —

I

114 A MOTOR TOUR

otherwise I scarcely knew how I should ever face those myriad eyes — all probably fixed upon me and nobody else.

Then came the cold, stark truth and dis- illusionment, as the music started and the curtain was rung up and I saw the painted ice palace and — only one skater, dressed, not in the striped woollens, but in black tights and a round pork- pie cap, and looking anywhere but at me !

The country that had glowed so strangely in the real world of my childhood was just like other countries. The human figurines in it were play- ing the same parts and " making up " for them in exactly the same manner as they had done elsewhere.

Perhaps there is some very real compensation awaiting us in old age for these disillusionments, if we only know how to find and to utilize it. The strenuous, care-laden life which has passed between our childhood and our advanced years may, perhaps, be made to fall away, and we may be conscious of no break between the Alpha and Omega of our existence. Once more we may be able to travel — perhaps motor — through Child I Land, and enjoy again the primal simplicity and naivete of that fairy world of wonder and illusion.

Leaving Toronto, we passed through a country that slowly transformed itself from a landscape dotted with manufacturing towns, and threaded by fine roads, to a pastoral and rocky one. Then the wild came, all but unheralded. Before it the fields fled, and where only a moment before one had looked upon farm houses and villas by placid Lake Simcoe, the narrow road had now

THROUGH CANADA 115

all it could do to force Its way by sinuous twists and turns between the barren, rugged hillsides. Snappy, hilarious work to penetrate the lanes of bush and hemlock and tender birch ! All but impossible to dodge the huge boulders which formed an integral part of the road — the heralds of the country of the Great Lakes, sending out skirmishers of muskeg and primeval forest and towering cliff.

It was the first whifF of that great lone tract which ends only in the region of eternal ice.

Gravenhurst, the stopping-place for the night, was found by the light of the moon — a little back- room restaurant by the fitful glow of a dispirited lamp shining through a doorway. Here flies swarmed over rude culinary treasures which tasted good and had primal savours. The coffee was all but ambrosial as it reached the long-denied palate, though it would doubtless be anathema to mortals tied to the home fireside and its finnicky notions. There was the tang of pine in the outside air, penetrating even the mustiness of the sorry-looking hotel where rough men sat round stoves, as Indians used to crouch round wigwam fires, and talked volubly of the Muskoka Lakes and the piloting of coasting boats through difficult channels and the sluggish watercourses of the bayous. The main street was sandy, as though a river had run dry there and its bed had been seized upon by the civic fathers and ingloriously put to man's use.

Daylight revealed a prosaic little town modestly dominated by a church tower, dominated in its turn by a huge, inornate water-tank bent on proving the triumph of the Material over the

ii6 A MOTOR TOUR

Spiritual. Brick had practically ousted wood from the street — a wonderful evidence of active sub-consciousness which brought the little town a thousand miles nearer civilization than one would have suspected. In pursuance of the pleasant fiction of metropolitan importance, a huge tree-trunk before a watch-maker's was sur- mounted by a gigantic watch whose painted face for some years had assured the passer-by that it was continually the hour for five o'clock tea in a community quite indifferent to such beguilements. The hardware store was indicated by a huge circular saw and littered with barbed wire fencing. Close by was the town bank, decorated with flower window-boxes and gay awnings, and topped by a balcony — a sure proof of its cosmopolitan origin. Poplars waved their tall plumes in double lines along the street as far as the con- tiguous forest of frail young birch and fir, and a cow fed industriously on broad spaces of grass, fringed by aspen and maple gorgeous in autumn crimson.

Armed with shovel, hammer, axe and tackle, purchased at the hardware store, as a pre- cautionary tribute to the wilderness ahead, we threaded the wide sandy roads into open spaces where Fire had cut ominous swaths of Death through the forest. Nothing but gaunt, black stumps remained, but these were now ornamented J with startling, many-hued posters which announced : ^ *' Jones' Emporium for Fashionable Goods ! " or " Splendid display of natty Ladies' Hosiery ! " How insolent seemed this puny self-importance of the merchant of small wares !

THROUGH CANADA 117

No car could preserve its sweetness of temper on these MId-Ontarian grades. Our own par- ticular machine showed ill-humour whenever her front paws struck the steep pitches. She growled and gave out litde snappy, short barks, forcing us to get down and adjust the carburettor to the new altitudes. Forewarned, we had armed our- selves with a handy compression pump directly attached to the petrol tank under the seat. Compression meant more climbing power, and affected her as oxygen does the athlete.

Stones, immodest of bulk and sharp of facets, strewed themselves carelessly about the hills in mistaken conception of their proper place in the scheme of creation. Flies became assiduous in their attentions. But always overhead spread a glorious blue sky, and always around, until one was fairly bathed in it, floated the tonic aroma ot pine. A few deserted houses, fallen into sym- pathetic decay with the road, set the seal on my growing conviction that I had missed the " turn- ing." However, the sun showed that we were navigating due north, and eighty-five miles away North Bay must lie directly in our path.

The road had all but disappeared in a tangle of undergrowth. One had a curious feeling of wander-