Hour in the dusk just before we left, when the
company gathered to say good-bye, while young couples walked in the
street, and the glare of the never-extinguished natural-gas lamps
coloured the leaves of the trees a stage green.
It was a woman, speaking out of the shadow, who said, what we all felt,
'You see, we just love our town,'
'So do we,' I said, and it slid behind us.
MOUNTAINS AND THE PACIFIC
The Prairie proper ends at Calgary, among the cattle-ranches, mills,
breweries, and three million acre irrigation works. The river that
floats timber to the town from the mountains does not slide nor rustle
like Prairie rivers, but brawls across bars of blue pebbles, and a
greenish tinge in its water hints of the snows.
What I saw of Calgary was crowded into one lively half-hour (motors were
invented to run about new cities). What I heard I picked up, oddly
enough, weeks later, from a young Dane in the North Sea. He was
qualmish, but his Saga of triumph upheld him.
'Three years ago I come to Canada by steerage - third class. And I have
the language to learn. Look at me! I have now my own dairy business, in
Calgary, and - look at me! - my own half section, that is, three hundred
and twenty acres. All my land which is mine! And now I come home, first
class, for Christmas here in Denmark, and I shall take out back with me,
some friends of mine which are farmers, to farm on those irrigated lands
near by Calgary. Oh, I tell you there is nothing wrong with Canada for a
man which works.'
'And will your friends go?' I inquired.
'You bet they will. It is all arranged already. I bet they get ready to
go now already; and in three years they will come back for Christmas
here in Denmark, first class like me.'
'Then you think Calgary is going ahead?'
'You bet! We are only at the beginning of things. Look at me! Chickens?
I raise chickens also in Calgary,' etc., etc.
After all this pageant of unrelieved material prosperity, it was a rest
to get to the stillness of the big foothills, though they, too, had been
in-spanned for the work of civilisation. The timber off their sides was
ducking and pitch-poling down their swift streams, to be sawn into
house-stuff for all the world. The woodwork of a purely English villa
may come from as many Imperial sources as its owner's income.
The train crept, whistling to keep its heart up, through the winding
gateways of the hills, till it presented itself, very humbly, before the
true mountains, the not so Little Brothers to the Himalayas.
