many points of view Canada is one of the most interesting of countries. From the rank of a somewhat humble dependency, made up of a heterogeneous collection of provinces, she has sprung within the last few decades into the rank of a proud and self-conscious nation. The contrast is notable. Indeed the country is one of contrasts. Her climate, her scenery, her sentiments, her people, her politics, all exhibit extremes the most extraordinary. A winter of Arctic severity is followed by a tropical summer. Within sight of luxuriant pastures glide stupendous glaciers. Flattest prairies spread to the feet of mountain ranges the rivals of the Alps; prim fields, orchards, and vineyards encroach upon primæval forests. Along with the hardy apple and the far-famed No. 1 Manitoba wheat, this land produces strawberries, peaches, grapes, and melons. Constitutionally content with British connexion, her people are intimately influenced by ideas and manners American. Indeed, her people are as heterogeneous as herself. The Maritime Provinces of the extreme east hardly call themselves Canadian; Quebec is French; Ontario is Canadian to the core; so is Manitoba; in the North-West Territories are settlers from almost every nationality in Europe; British Columbia, in the extreme west, again, fights shy of the cognomen Canadian. Newfoundland holds aloof altogether. A rude and toilsome social life goes hand in hand with patches of refinement and culture unmistakable. Canadian cheese took the prize at Chicago; Canadian poetry has been crowned by the Academy. Lauding democratic institutions to the skies, Radical to the last degree, Canada nevertheless contains within herself castes and cliques in their horror of such principles almost rabid. With a political system the counterpart of the British, her politics are rife with personalities, election protests, corruption trials.

However, I am not here concerned with political or social tendencies or delinquencies.

§ 16

Soon after I arrived I betook me, one spring, in my canoe, down the banks of the River Otonabee. Pitching a tent, I made this a focus from which I radiated in any direction I chose—dawdling and sauntering and lounging and seeing what there was to be seen.

And what is there to be seen? Well, let me give you here another little photograph.

I write, sitting ensconced, sheltered from sun and wind, between two huge roots of the stump of a burned pine on a bare hill overlooking the river. Not a place in which to see much, you would say. Pardon me, you are wrong. You, shut in between four superficies of wall-paper, a whitewashed ceiling, and a carpet, know absolutely nothing of the clouded sky as I know it, gazing at it unconfined from horizon to zenith. Far overhead, the delicatest vapoury cirri fleck the purest blue; in the distance, bold, rounded, white cumuli rise above a misty haze of grey, against which as a background rise in points and curves and lines dark green firs and round-topped birches and emerald hill-sides; and below these, and nearer, comes the water—in no two spots the same—ruffled and unruffled, wavy and still, dark blue and lead-grey, in eddies and in currents; here dimpled, there like a mirror; now dazzling you with a thousand flashing, floating stars; there sullenly bearing up the reflections and shadows of the great, dark trees above it—at one moment thus, and while you say it, otherwise.—For a symbol of God—serene, shapeless, profound, in eternal repose, unchanging, all-embracing, majestic—give me the blue sky; for a symbol of Man—tossed, shapen, ever at strife, changeful, unresting, evanescent, with dark depths and foul weeds, sombre and woeful when deprived of the light of heaven, and beautiful only when beautified by skyey tints—give me the water. And after the water, and closer, comes my foreground—tufted grass and brown soil, with dandelions and clover and mullein, and here and there a piece of glistering granite or a quaint-shaped, rotting tree trunk. Amongst these hops fearless, while I sit still and silent with half-closed eyes, the thrush or the grey-bird, chasing insects a few feet from my foot; while above me, on the very stump against which I lean, perches the various-coloured high-holder.—Truly, it seems as if Nature had taken me to be one with her, recognised me as part of her manifold immensity, looked upon me as a consort, a co-mate.

And am I not a part of her? It needs not to comprehend the harmonious workings of mighty natural laws to perceive the unity of all things. Each minutest spot on this earth verifies the truth. I need not move a step to find evidences of it. I look at my blackened stump, and not one square inch can I find which is not instinct with evidences of life within life; life interfused with, dependent on, correlated with other life, with signs of the ceaseless being born, growing, dying—with processes interlinked with processes. It is a universe of processes, this in which we live; not a universe in which this, that, and the other separate thing exists for a time, but a universe of subsistences, made up wholly of interdependent existences. Wherever I look on my trunk I see mosses and lichens and creeping ants and beetles, and the holes of boring worms, and the marks of woodpeckers' beaks, chrysalises, seeds, twigs. To each of these the stump is its universe: they regard it as we do the solar system, as a place, a locality, made for them to inhabit. They do not understand that the tree is itself but part of a greater whole of life, of thought; a link in an endless chain of existence. And so we often forget that this infinitely various and changing universe which we call ours, which we look upon as our habitation, our dwelling-house, in which we move about as lords and masters, is after all but an infinitesimal fragment of the real demesne of the true Lord of the Manor. And what if after all we were not even bailiffs of this manor? What if we were but the furniture in some small attic—mirrors, it may be—and that what we call our universe prove to be nothing more than the small part of this attic which is reflected in us!

XII
Autumn in Canada

§ 17

This was in the spring. But I remember an autumn walk in Canada that was very different from this, both in the locality chosen and in the scenes viewed.

Late in October once, a friend and myself had three whole days' holiday!—rare and joyous boon! We took a train to the little Ontarian town of Stayner. From Stayner to the shores of the Georgian Bay was a little trudge of about three miles. But a trudge it was; for the train had been late; our knapsacks were heavy; the sun had set; and both darkness and hunger came on apace. But at last the shore was reached. And what a shore it was! For, beating on it from far away to the north was a wealth of waters—oceanic in magnitude, sombre as the sea and, as the sea, mysterious.

As we walked, the night closed in, the northern night, so beautiful, so clear, so immense. But it was chill and dark, and either we must advance, or we must seek shelter where we were. Shall it be a leafy "lean-to" under a pine, constructed of heaped-up boughs, or shall it be a trudge to a civilised hostelry? Such were the problems discussed over sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs (washed down with sandy water from the bay), as we sat on a wave-washed log, the wind blowing strong in our faces. The ground was damp as damp; the pines seemed lugubriously incompetent to