Put together.
Yet it would do her no harm to send a commission through the ten great
cities of the Empire to see what is being done there in the way of
street cleaning, water-supply, and traffic-regulation.
Here and there the people are infected with the unworthy superstition of
'hustle,' which means half-doing your appointed job and applauding your
own slapdasherie for as long a time as would enable you to finish off
two clean pieces of work. Little congestions of traffic, that an English
rural policeman, in a country town, disentangles automatically, are
allowed to develop into ten-minute blocks, where wagons and men bang,
and back, and blaspheme, for no purpose except to waste time.
The assembly and dispersal of crowds, purchase of tickets, and a good
deal of the small machinery of life is clogged and hampered by this
unstable, southern spirit which is own brother to Panic. 'Hustle' does
not sit well on the national character any more than falsetto or
fidgeting becomes grown men. 'Drive,' a laudable and necessary quality,
is quite different, and one meets it up the Western Road where the new
country is being made.
We got clean away from the Three Cities and the close-tilled farming
and orchard districts, into the Land of Little Lakes - a country of
rushing streams, clear-eyed ponds, and boulders among berry-bushes; all
crying 'Trout' and 'Bear.'
Not so very long ago only a few wise people kept holiday in that part of
the world, and they did not give away their discoveries. Now it has
become a summer playground where people hunt and camp at large. The
names of its further rivers are known in England, and men, otherwise
sane, slip away from London into the birches, and come out again bearded
and smoke-stained, when the ice is thick enough to cut a canoe.
Sometimes they go to look for game; sometimes for minerals - perhaps,
even, oil. No one can prophesy. 'We are only at the beginning of
things.'
Said an Afrite of the Railway as we passed in our magic carpet: 'You've
no notion of the size of our tourist-traffic. It has all grown up since
the early 'Nineties. The trolley car teaches people in the towns to go
for little picnics. When they get more money they go for long ones. All
this Continent will want playgrounds soon. We're getting them ready.'
The girl from Winnipeg saw the morning frost lie white on the long grass
at the lake edges, and watched the haze of mellow golden birch leaves as
they dropped. 'Now that's the way trees ought to turn,' she said. 'Don't
you think our Eastern maple is a little violent in colour?' Then we
passed through a country where for many hours the talk in the cars was
of mines and the treatment of ores.
