This Time While I Watched Assemblies Seated, Men In Hotels And Passers-By, I Fancied That He Kept This Habit Of Semi-Tenseness At Home Among His Own; That It Was The Complement Of The Man's Still Countenance, And His Even, Lowered Voice.

Looking at their footmarks on the ground they seem to throw an almost straight track, neither splayed nor in-toed, and to set their feet down with a gentle forward pressure, rather like the Australian's stealthy footfall.

Talking among themselves, or waiting for friends, they did not drum with their fingers, fiddle with their feet, or feel the hair on their faces. These things seem trivial enough, but when breeds are in the making everything is worth while. A man told me once - but I never tried the experiment - that each of our Four Races light and handle fire in their own way.

Small wonder we differ! Here is a people with no people at their backs, driving the great world-plough which wins the world's bread up and up over the shoulder of the world - a spectacle, as it might be, out of some tremendous Norse legend. North of them lies Niflheim's enduring cold, with the flick and crackle of the Aurora for Bifrost Bridge that Odin and the Aesir visited. These people also go north year by year, and drag audacious railways with them. Sometimes they burst into good wheat or timber land, sometimes into mines of treasure, and all the North is foil of voices - as South Africa was once - telling discoveries and making prophecies.

When their winter comes, over the greater part of this country outside the cities they must sit still, and eat and drink as the Aesir did. In summer they cram twelve months' work into six, because between such and such dates certain far rivers will shut, and, later, certain others, till, at last, even the Great Eastern Gate at Quebec locks, and men must go in and out by the side-doors at Halifax and St. John. These are conditions that make for extreme boldness, but not for extravagant boastings.

The maples tell when it is time to finish, and all work in hand is regulated by their warning signal. Some jobs can be put through before winter; others must be laid aside ready to jump forward without a lost minute in spring. Thus, from Quebec to Calgary a note of drive - not hustle, but drive and finish-up - hummed like the steam-threshers on the still, autumn air.

Hunters and sportsmen were coming in from the North; prospectors with them, their faces foil of mystery, their pockets full of samples, like prospectors the world over. They had already been wearing wolf and coon skin coats. In the great cities which work the year round, carriage - shops exhibited one or two seductive nickel-plated sledges, as a hint; for the sleigh is 'the chariot at hand here of Love.' In the country the farmhouses were stacking up their wood-piles within reach of the kitchen door, and taking down the fly-screens, (One leaves these on, as a rule, till the double windows are brought up from the cellar, and one has to hunt all over the house for missing screws.) Sometimes one saw a few flashing lengths of new stovepipe in a backyard, and pitied the owner. There is no humour in the old, bitter-true stovepipe jests of the comic papers.

But the railways - the wonderful railways - told the winter's tale most emphatically. The thirty-ton coal cars were moving over three thousand miles of track. They grunted and lurched against each other in the switch-yards, or thumped past statelily at midnight on their way to provident housekeepers of the prairie towns. It was not a clear way either; for the bacon, the lard, the apples, the butter, and the cheese, in beautiful whitewood barrels, were rolling eastwards toward the steamers before the wheat should descend on them. That is the fifth act of the great Year-Play for which the stage must be cleared. On scores of congested sidings lay huge girders, rolled beams, limbs, and boxes of rivets, once intended for the late Quebec Bridge - now so much mere obstruction - and the victuals had to pick their way through 'em; and behind the victuals was the lumber - clean wood out of the mountains - logs, planks, clapboards, and laths, for which we pay such sinful prices in England - all seeking the sea. There was housing, food, and fuel for millions, on wheels together, and never a grain yet shifted of the real staple which men for five hundred miles were threshing out in heaps as high as fifty-pound villas.

Add to this, that the railways were concerned for their own new developments - double-trackings, loops, cutoffs, taps, and feeder lines, and great swoops out into untouched lands soon to be filled with men. So the construction, ballast, and material trains, the grading machines, the wrecking cars with their camel-like sneering cranes - the whole plant of a new civilisation - had to find room somewhere in the general rally before Nature cried, 'Lay off!'

Does any one remember that joyful strong confidence after the war, when it seemed that, at last, South Africa was to be developed - when men laid out railways, and gave orders for engines, and fresh rolling-stock, and labour, and believed gloriously in the future? It is true the hope was murdered afterward, but - multiply that good hour by a thousand, and you will have some idea of how it feels to be in Canada - a place which even an 'Imperial' Government cannot kill. I had the luck to be shown some things from the inside - to listen to the details of works projected; the record of works done. Above all, I saw what had actually been achieved in the fifteen years since I had last come that way. One advantage of a new land is that it makes you feel older than Time.

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