Friday, October 3rd, saw the Prince visiting a string of three towns.
Medicine Hat was the first of these, an attractive, park-like place full of "pep." Medicine Hat's claim to fame beyond its name lies in the fact that, having discovered that it was sitting upon a vast subterranean reservoir of natural gas, it promptly harnessed it to its own use. Now, that elemental thing is in the control of humanity, and heats the town, and tamely drives the wheels of industry.
The outstanding ceremony was the way little boys suddenly took fright on a roof. In the middle of the town, beside the street, is a tall, thin standpipe, and this standpipe was to demonstrate a "shoot off" of the gas. Scores of small boys climbed on to the roofs of neighbouring sheds to see the fun. First there was a meek, submissive flame burning at the top of the pipe, and looking weak in the fine sunlight. Then, abruptly, the flame shot up a hundred feet, and there was a loud roaring. Not only was the roaring a terrifying thing, but the force of that rush of gas made the ground, the roof and the little boys tremble. Little boys came off that roof in record time, and with such a clatter that the effort of the standpipe almost lost its place as a star turn. This tremendous pressure is not habitual; it is, I believe, obtained by bursting a charge in one of the gas wells.
The Prince also saw the uses to which the gas was put in a big pottery mill. The kilns here were an incandescent mass of fire, the work of the easily controlled gas that does the work with a tithe of the labour and at a mere fraction of the cost necessitated by ordinary baking kilns.
Maple Creek and Swift Current were stepping-off places, with all their populations packed in the square about the station to give the Prince a hearty greeting. At Maple Creek the pretty daughters of the township were very much in evidence, and held His Royal Highness up with autograph albums.
Moose Jaw, one of the few towns where a quaint name is traceable, for it is the creek where the white man mended the cart with a moose jaw-bone, which the Prince reached on the morning of October 4th, is a bigger town and proud of its position as a grain, food and machinery distributing centre for Southern Saskatchewan. In its station courtyard it had built up an admirable exhibit of its vegetables and fruit, its sides of bacon, its grain in ear, its porridge oats in packets, and its butter and cream in drums and churns; while chiefest of all it showed ramparts of some of the two million sacks of flour it handles annually. The whole of the exhibit was set in a moat of grain and potatoes.
The Prince went to the University Grounds, where a mighty crowd attended the welcoming ceremony, and where a wild and timeless waltz-quadrille of motors which straggled all-whither over the grounds, marked the attempts of people to locate and follow him when he drove away to the hospital and a big packing factory. At the packing plant he saw the whole process of handling meat, from the moment when cowboys in chaps drove the herd to the pens to the final jointing of the steer.
From Moose Jaw he went to Regina, which he reached that afternoon. Regina is the capital of Saskatchewan, but an accidental capital. Somewhere about 1880 it was decided to start itself in quite another place. Qu'Appelle, where there was a Hudson Bay Fort and the country was attractive, was the site chosen. And Qu'Appelle opened its mouth too wide—or, anyhow so the version of the story I was told goes. The land-owners there asked an outside number of million dollars, and the townplanners went to Pile o' Bones instead.
Pile o' Bones was a point near Wascana Lake where there had been a big slaughter of buffaloes. It was a point of no importance, but Canadians don't mind that sort of thing. When they make up their minds to build a city, a city arises. Regina arose, broad and bustling, a trifle chilly as becomes a city of the prairie, rather flat and not altogether attractive, yet purposeful.
It also gained another reason for regard by becoming the headquarters of the "Mounties," the Royal North-West Mounted Police, whose main barracks are here. We saw something of the discipline of that fine service in the way the big crowds were handled, for the Prince drove through the streets in the order and state of a London or New York pageant.
The Parliament Buildings are beautifully situated before a wide stretch of water. They are the semi-classical, domed, white stone buildings of the design of those at Edmonton and other cities—a sort of standardized parliament building in fact. Before them, on the terraces and lawn that shelved down to the water, the big throng made a scene of quick beauty. There were ranks of pretty nurses, rank upon rank of khaki veterans, battalions of boy scouts mainly divorced from hats which were perpetually aloft on upraised and enthusiastic poles, aisles of sitting wounded whom the Prince shook hands with, and thick, supporting masses of civilians. Lining this throng were unbending fillets of scarlet statues, the "Mounties" of the guard. And humanizing the whole were solid banks of school-children who sang and cheered at the right as well as the wrong moment.
The presentation of medals—one to a blinded doctor, who, led by a comrade, received the most poignant storm of cheers I have ever heard in my life—and a giant public reception finished that day's ceremonies. Sunday, October 5th, was a day of rest, and Monday was the day of the "Mounties."
The Prince showed a particular interest in his visit to the Headquarters of this splendid and romantic corps. The Royal North-West Mounted Police is a classic figure in the history of the Empire. The day is now past when the lonely red rider of the wilds stood for the only token of awe and authority among Indian tribes and "bad men" camps, but though that may be there are no more useful fellows than these smart and sturdy men, who, scarlet-coated, and with their Stetsons at a daring angle, add a dash of colour and bravery to the streets of Western Canada.
In his inspection the Prince saw the reason why the physique of the men should be so splendid and their nerve so sure. The training of the R.N.W.M.P. makes no appeal to the weakling of spirit or flesh. He saw their firm discipline. He saw them breaking in the bucking bronchos they had to ride. He saw them go through exhausting mounted tests. His congratulations on their wonderful show were expressed with great warmth.
From Regina the Prince took a holiday. He went up to the sporting country near Qu'Appelle for duck and game shooting, spending from Monday, October 6th, until Friday, October 10th, there. This district abounds in duck, and the Prince and his staff had very fair sport. During his stay the weather suddenly turned colder, the rivers froze over and snow fell. So sudden was the cold snap that one of those with the Prince was caught napping. He woke up to find that his false teeth were frozen into the solid block of ice that had been water the night before. He had to take the tooth glass to the kitchen of the house where he was staying, and thaw it before he could even articulate his emotions adequately.
Riding in a fast car from the scene of the sport to the station gave the Prince an indication of what winter would be like in the prairies, where the wind from the north sweeps down unresisted, and with such a force that it seems to go right through all coats, save the Canadian winter armour of "coon coat" or fur.
Brandon and Portage la Prairie, two determined little towns, gave the Prince a snow welcome. The weather kept neither grown-ups nor children away from the liveliest of greetings. They were attractive halts in a run that took the Prince to Winnipeg.
In Winnipeg we appreciated the virtues of central heating, for the wind made the whole universe extraordinarily cold. Up to this I had considered central heating a stuffy subject, and I am yet not fully converted, for though there are those who say it can be controlled quite easily, I have yet to meet the superman who can do it.
All the same, steam heating has its virtues. On those cold days in Winnipeg we lived in a world that knew not draughts. It was almost a solemn joy to sit in a bath, and to feel that though half of one was in hot water, the other half was also comfortable and not the prey of every devilish current of icy air such as sports itself in those damp refrigerators, the British bathrooms. Naturally, since we are staying in a Canadian hotel of the up-to-date kind, a bathroom was attached to our bedroom as a mere matter of course. But if we had had to wander Anglicanly along corridors in search of a bathroom we should still have been draught free, for central heating deals with corridors, and stairways, and halls and lounges with one universal gesture.
Not merely in so fine an hotel as the "Royal Alexandra," but in the private houses and the "apartments" (English—"flats"), central heat and good bathrooms are items of everyday—though many Canadians burn an open fire in their sitting-rooms for the comfortable look it gives.
These things are not merely for comfort, but they are, with the hardwood floors, the mail chutes in "apartment" houses and the rest, part of the great science of labour-saving, which the whole of America practises.
One realizes the need of labour-saving when one sees in a theatre vestibule the following notice:
As nurses are rare, and servants are rare, the Americans have to organize themselves to simplify the task of housekeeping.
The "apartments" are compact and neat, arranged for easy handling. The rents are not cheap. One very pleasant little "apartment," "hired" by a newly-married couple, was made up of three rooms, a kitchen and a balcony. It was in the suburbs. The rent was thirty-five dollars a month, say eighty-four pounds a year, for a flat, which, under the same conditions (rates included) could be obtained for thirty-five pounds a year in England in pre-war days. For this, however, central heating and perpetual hot water are included. My friend told me that his electric light bill came to three dollars a month, and his gas bill (for cooking) to rather less than that. In Calgary a friend of mine had a pretty "apartment" even smaller in a suburban district, was paying about ninety-six pounds a year over all,i.e., rent, light and gas (central heating being included). Most of these "apartments" have an ice house (refrigerator) attached, blocks of ice being left on the doorstep every morning, just as the milk is left.
Winnipeg is an attractive town to live in. It has plenty of amusements, including several good theatres and music halls—fed, of course, mainly from American sources. Mrs. Walker, whose husband owns the Walker Theatre, told me that Laurence Irving and his wife acted on their stage just before sailing on the ill-fatedEmpress of Ireland. She went up to his dressing-room to say "Good-bye" to him, the night before he left, and in answer to her knock he suddenly appeared before her, dressed in black from head to foot, for the character he was playing that night. His appearance filled her with dread—it seemed to her, as she looked at him, that something terrible was to happen. Both Laurence Irving and his wife were, however, in excellent spirits. Canada treated them royally, and they were going back home full of optimism, confident that the play that Laurence Irving was then finishing—one dealing with Napoleon—was to prove the greatest success of their careers.
We met at Winnipeg, also, a number of the brilliant men and women journalists whose energy and brains are responsible for the many fine papers that focus in this city. We had met such companions of our own dispensation in other cities, in Ottawa, Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto and Quebec. They were not merely keen and accomplished craftsmen, but their hospitality to us was always of the most delightful generosity.
The Princess visit to Winnipeg was undertaken to give him the opportunity of sayingau revoirto the West. At the vivid luncheon he gave in the attractive Alexandra Hotel to all the leaders of the West, men and women, he insisted that it wasau revoir, and that so well had the West treated him, so attractive was its atmosphere, that he meant not merely to return, but to become something of a rancher here in the "little place" he had bought in Alberta. He spoke of the splendid spirit of the West, and the magnificent future that was the West's for the grasping, and he left on all those who heard him an impression of genuine affection for the people and the land with which his journey had brought him in contact.
He himself left the West a "real scout." It is a mere truism to say that his personality had conquered the West, as it had won for him affection everywhere. His straightforward masculinity and his entire lack of side, his cheerfulness and his keenness, his freedom from "frills," as one man put it, had made him the friend of everybody. I heard practically the same expressions of real affection from all grades, from Chief Justice to car conductors. I heard, I think, but one man pooh-pooh, not so much this universal regard for the Prince, as a universal enthusiasm for something royal. A labour-leader, who happened to be present, administered correction:
"That chap's all right," he insisted, and his word carried weight. "I saw him in France, and there's not much that is wrong with him. If you're as democratic as he is, then you're all right."
The brightest of dances, a game of squash rackets, and the Prince left, undaunted by the snow, for week-end shooting. On Tuesday, October 14th, he was in the train again, travelling East, in the direction of the Cobalt mining country, buoyed up by the prophecy of the local weather-wise that the cold snap would not endure, but would be followed by the delightfully keen yet warm weather of the "Indian Summer." The local weather-wise were right, but it took time.
Cobalt is a fantasy town. It is a Rackham drawing with all its little grey houses perched up on queer shelves and masses of greeny-grey rock. Its streets are whimsical. They wander up and down levels, and in and out of houses, and sometimes they are roads and sometimes they are stairs. One glance at them and I began to repeat, "There was a crooked man, who walked a crooked mile." A delightful genius had done the town to illustrate that rhyme.
And the rope railways that sent a procession of emotionless buckets across the train when we pulled in, the greeny-grey lake that presently (inside the town) ceased being a lake and became a big lake basin of smooth, greeny-grey mine slime, the vast greeny-grey mounds of mill refuse, the fantastic spideriness of the lattice mill workings, and humped corrugated iron sheds, all of them slightly greeny-grey in the prevailing fashion—the whole picture was fantastic; indeed, Cobalt appears a city of gnomes.
We had travelled all Tuesday and Wednesday, striking east from Winnipeg, only stopping occasionally for the Prince to return the courtesies of the crowds that had collected at wayside stations, and, on one occasion, to allow the Prince to obtain a walk. At North Bay we had left the C.P.R. main line, and pushed up the road of the Timiskaming Railway towards the silver mining town of Cobalt and the gold mining town of Timmins.
During the night and morning of Thursday, October 16th, we had pushed up through a rocky and inhospitable country, where many lakes lie coldly amid stony hillocks that thrust up through live green spruce, or the white ghosts of spruce murdered by fires.
It seems a country fore-ordained to loneliness, and it is hard to believe that a rich town has arisen in it. As a matter of truth, that town would not have been born to it but for an accident. Cobalt was not dreamed of as a city. The intention of the railway engineers had been to drive a line through this land to open up good farming country to the north of Cobalt Lake. Only this accident brought Cobalt into being at all.
Two bored contractors employed on the construction of the railways are responsible for it. They were filling out an idle hour in throwing pebbles into the lake; one of them noticed that the pebbles had a queer texture. Both men examined them, for many of the kind were scattered about.
"Lead," decided one of the men, but the other gave his opinion for silver. He had the strange pebble analysed, and silver it was. On the wave of excitement that followed, Cobalt was born.
As the Prince saw it on October 16th it was obviously a mining town, careless of how it built itself as long as it could get at the rich stopes, or veins, that burrow amid the calcite rock of the district. It is this indifference to planning that makes the town fantastic, though there is something of the fantastic in the character of its people and the welcome they gave.
Above the heads of the very generous and homely throng that welcomed the Prince, the streets were strung from side to side with banners of welcome, many of them touched with native humour.
declared one, while another offered the "glad hand" with the injunction:
After a corrugated drive along the switchback streets, the miners had their own individual welcome for him. At the Coniagas Mine these stocky men, in brown overalls, the acetylene lamps that lighted them through the underworld still alight on the front of their hats, were gathered about the pit-head workings, and they gave him a particular cheer.
The Prince was shown through the whole of the above-ground workings in this mine. He went into the breaking and stamping rooms, where he could not hear himself speak for the crashings of the mills that broke up the quartz; he saw the machines that washed the silver free from the living rock by jigging it over metal shelves across which flowed a constant film of water; he saw the pulverized slime being treated with oil and pouring bubbling from big vats through wooden chutes.
He climbed to the top of one of the big mounds of dried slime that pile up round the workings. In the old days these mounds were rubbish for which man had no use. Now science has stepped in, and this rubbish is being treated once more, and from four to six ounces of silver per ton are being reclaimed. A big mechanical shovel, working on an overhead cable, was dropping and digging into this dump; it lifted itself full and moved along the rope until it dropped its load into a chute. No man went near it: a super-fellow at the levers of a donkey-engine maintained a control.
The mine gave him a little memento in silver, and very prettily. Two delightful little girls came out of a mass of miners, and handed him a small brick of solid silver inscribed to commemorate the visit. The brick weighed thirty-five ounces.
In a short while the Prince was in the place where the brick was smelted. This was in a small house containing several furnaces built to the level of a man's breast. They are not large furnaces, but when their doors are opened one can look on to an incandescent pool of liquid silver that the gas or oil flames have melted. The Prince watched the process of casting bricks with interest, questioning the two demobilized soldiers who worked a big ladle with the close curiosity he had shown over every detail of the milling. Dipping the long-handled ladle into the shining pool, the soldiers swung it out, and poured the spitting and sparkling contents into a metal mould, in which the silver brick was formed. In this small room is smelted all the metal of one of the richest mining towns in the world.
From here the cars went adventurously along the steep and spiral roads, and amid the tall corrugated iron towers and buildings that form the many mine workings. The Prince passed round the bases of great grey slack and slime heaps of old and discarded workings that have been worth millions of dollars in their day, but, after the fickle way of silver veins, have now given out. Through this harsh and grey country he drove until he came to the O'Brien mine, where he was to try the adventure of a descent.
The descent into a mine needs armour, and the Prince buckled on rubber overshoes, an oilskin coat and a sou'wester hat. Garbed thus, and with an acetylene lamp in his hand, he was the natural prey of photographers, who refused to spare him until he escaped into the cage and baffled them by going underground.
Cobalt, which had been cheering the Prince at every available spot, can boast that she also managed to do it in the bowels of the earth. Descending three hundred feet, His Royal Highness walked some distance through the dark tunnel of the workings, and in each gallery the ghostly figures of miners gave him a subterranean cheer. At the end of this walk he went down another three hundred feet, to where a new stope was being started. This was his own particular vein, for it had already been christened "The Prince of Wales Stope" in his honour—no mean compliment, for it is anticipated that it will yield at least a million dollars.
The Prince showed a natural interest in this seam, and in the methods of working it, and he also took, as it were, a sponsor's fee, for he worked a piece of rock from the vein with his fingers and carried it away as a memento.
Beyond Cobalt the land becomes greener and more hospitable, and it opens up into great ranges of good farms, and this state of things continues until, along a branch line, the sprawling and great gold-mining centres of Timmins threw their bleak melancholy over the land.
In Timmins itself can be seen a Canadian town at birth. Its wooden shack houses and brick buildings are only now being brought to order along its streets. Its roads are still ankle-deep in mud; buckboards and other country rigs are, with motors, the means of transport—it only wanted Douglas Fairbanks in a Western get-up to complete it as a town projected into reality from the "movies." It is a one-man town, and bears the name of the pioneer who brought it into being, and who is still the driving force of the great gold mines that make it one of the richest places on the earth. He is a quiet man, whose force of character is concealed behind gold-rimmed spectacles and a rooted instinct against waste of words.
The Prince spent an interesting hour at his mines, which are among the largest, if they are not the largest, of their kind in the Empire; all the processes were explained to him, though he did not go into the workings as he did at Cobalt. He had, it goes without saying, a royal reception here, which, in the hands of the liveliest of mayors, had more than a tinge of humour in it.
Timmins was the Prince's last adventure in the wilds. Steaming south and west along the Grand Trunk Railway, he passed through the delightful holiday scenery of the Muskoka Lakes, and, in country becoming gradually more and more domestic and British, approached Hamilton and the thickly inhabited areas of Western Ontario.
In coming to Hamilton the Prince returned to the regions of big welcomes. It was not that the East was more loyal or warm than the West, but that, grouped in the vast area of Canada lying between the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes, are the old and teeming industrial centres of the Dominion. In this area is about seventy per cent. of Canada's population, and men, women and children can pack themselves into the streets by the tens of thousands, be those streets ever so many or ever so long.
This was Hamilton's way. Hamilton is a "Get on or Get out" proposition. It is dubbed not merely "the Birmingham of Canada," but also "the Ambitious City." It is not the largest town in the Dominion, but it asks you to reserve judgment as to that, and meanwhile it lets you know that it is one of the richest.
From the abrupt heights that rise behind it, one looks down, not upon an historic panorama, as at Quebec, but a Brangwyn panel of "modern progress." Between the abrupt hills and the waters of Lake Ontario the city is packed tight on a rising strip of plain. The stacks of many industries, the rigid uplift of square, practical factories, the fret of derricks and patent loaders by the waterside, all seen under smudges and scarves of factory smoke, would give it an air of resolute drabness if it were not for its multitude of trees.
Trees there are in profusion, rising up between the stiff walls of commercial buildings, lining the long, straight avenues that look like bands of greyish water from the heights, and grouping about the comely houses that form the residential quarters on the slopes rising towards the onlooker on The Mountain. But, even in spite of the trees and the blue shine of the distant lake, there is an atmosphere of industrial greyness that differentiates it from other cities.
There was an air of industrialism about the packed welcome Hamilton gave the Prince. He had slipped into the city on the afternoon of Friday, October 17th, but not officially. He was merely to attend the invisible pleasures of golf and dancing. On Saturday he entered Hamilton ceremoniously, officially. He drove down in a car to a siding, entered the train, was backed into the station, and alighted from it and entered the car he had just left. The church bells rang "Oh, Canada," and he had "arrived."
The industrial atmosphere was created by the workers who thronged the narrow business streets in their overalls, having obviously come out from bench and ironworks and packing factories, as well as from the stores and offices, to see the Prince. I noticed among the crowd a great number of Jews, more than I had seen in other Canadian cities.
Yet, if Hamilton was industrial, it also knew how to meet a Prince. Its streets were delightfully decorated, and in the general scheme of bunting the authorities had hung over the roads in pairs, small square banners of the victory medal ribbon, so that the Prince passed under this sign of triumph always. Swaying high up in the trees, just coming into the autumn gold of foliage, this scheme of decoration made a most effective showing.
Part of the Prince's ride through the town was along James Street, that sweeps in a single straight line from The Mountain to the shore of the lake. All manner of citizens were crowded in this sumptuous boulevard and in the pretty streets that ran through the pleasant home centres. Now the cars passed through packed ranks of children ranged according to schools, and all torn between the purely human desire of shouting their heads off and the duty of singing, "God bless the Prince of Wales," the result being an eerie noise that left no doubt about the quality of the enthusiasm. When there were no children there were grown-ups, gathered everywhere, perched everywhere and anywhere in their determination to get a good view. On one low bungalow was a family group, mother, father, children and baby-in-arms, sitting perilous but serenely content on the very ridge-pole of the roof. From a group of houses in the same suave street had come many men, matrons and maidens, waving the green flag of the harp, all fiercely insistent on the rights of Ireland to cheer and show enthusiasm.
So the Prince came to a great, comely semi-Gothic hall with a million children round it (that was the effect, though Hamilton hasn't half a million inhabitants), and I don't know how many in it. This hall was a chamber of children, a forcing-house of delightful infants. Under the broad, mellow light that beat down from the great windows in the roof all the prettiest kiddies in the world seemed to be set in banks of cultivation. Children were in mass round the walls. Children stretched upward in a square of galleries. Children flowered everywhere—only a fillet of walking-space was clear, where a desperate gardener had clipped a passage-way for the Prince, it seemed.
And they were such vivacious children. They cheered. They sang lilting part-songs, each great bank of infancy taking up the melody until the hall was all tune, and the walls seemed to be pressed back by the fine soaring sweetness of the fugue. And when they had sung they burst into the sudden and amazing sparkle of their school yell, "Hamilton! Hamilton! Hamilton!" and then diffused their fervour in a swinging burst of cheers.
And Canadians, children or adults, can cheer. Hands and flags and hats and body join in, to give an impression both passionate and irresistible. And before this storm the Prince could only laugh and wave back with something of the children's abandon, and so delighted did he seem that one of the Canadians who watched him had every right to cry out:
"Say—say—isn't he just tickled to death?"
Through the streets in his ride to The Mountain this wave of cheering followed him, and, quick to respond, the Prince was once more on his feet in his car and waving gladly back to the crowds on the sidewalk. So ardently did he do this, that a little girl who had watched him coming and who watched his passing, turned to her mother and cried:
"Poor hand."
It was certainly a strenuously used hand, but its endurance had limits, and, as he was forced to transfer the office of hand-shaking to the left, so he frequently had to use the left for waving on these long rides, and give the right a rest.
On The Mountain, the tall buttress that curves behind the town, the Prince drove through avenues of fine homes to the Hamilton Memorial Hospital, a magnificent tribute to those men of the city who gave their lives in the war. It is, of course, thoroughly up-to-date in appointments, but it is more than that: it is a poignant link with the brave dead, for every ward has been dedicated to a brave son of Hamilton who died overseas, and a brass plate in each ward records the heroic name.
At this hospital the Prince was received by a Welsh choir, many of the lasses dressed in the tall hats and native laces and fabrics of Wales, and, so that nobody should make mistakes about them, each (men and women) wore a fresh leek at the breast.
The Prince also visited the Sanatorium on the heights, and drove out to the Club, where he lunched, and, on the whole, filled a day with all the bustle that Hamilton knows well how to put into events. It was only at night that he was free to leave this vigorous town, and start for the restful beauties of Niagara.
The best first impression of Niagara Falls is, I think, the one the Prince of Wales obtained.
Those who really wish to experience the thrills of grandeur and poetry of this marvel had better delay their visit until a night in summer, and make arrangements with the railway time-table to get there somewhere after dark. Upon arriving they must hire a car, and drive down to the splendid boulevard on the Canadian side. They will then see the great mass of water under the shine of lights, falling eternally, eternally presenting a picture of almost cruel beauty. They will then know an experience that transcends all other experiences as well as all attempts at description.
The curious feeling of disappointment which comes to many in daylight will have been guarded against, and, stimulated by that wondrous first vision, they will tide over that spiritually barren period which many know until the marvel of the Falls begins to "grow on them."
The Prince came from Hamilton to Niagara somewhere very close to midnight on Saturday, the 18th. He was carried through the dark town and country to the house of one of the Falls Commissioners. From here, through a filigree of trees and leaves, he could look across the smoking gorge to the Falls on the American side. Batteries of great arc lights, focused and hidden cunningly, shone upon the curtain of white and tumbling waters, and upon the strong, black mass of Goat Island, that is perched like a diver eternally hesitant on the very brink of the two-hundred-foot plunge.
The ghostly beauty of the falling water through the light, now a solid and tremendous curve, now broken into filaments and zigzag whorls, now veiled by the upward drift of the gossamer spray, held the Prince's gaze for some time. But even that beauty was transcended. He himself pressed an electric switch, and the grand curve of the Canadian Horseshoe blazed fully alight for the first time in their history, and though from this position this could not be fully seen, this new addition of light gave the whole mass before his eyes an additional loveliness.
From this point the Prince motored through the town to the splendid wide promenade that borders the Canadian side of the gorge, and spent half an hour watching the fascinating play of falling water and spray in the narrow cauldron of the Horseshoe.
He stood a foot away from the point where the water leaps in its magnificent and enigmatic curve into the tortured pool below. Green at the curve, the water is a mass of curdled white in the strong lights as it falls. Beneath, the face of the water is a passionate surface of whirlpools and eddies and tossing whiteness. From the tremendous impact of the drop a column of spray shoots and curls high up in the air. It towers quite six hundred feet above the surface of the water, and it is hard to believe that enduring mass of spray comes from the fall; in the distance one is convinced that it is steam arising from some big factory.
On the next day (Sunday) the Prince saw the Falls in their every phase. He walked up-stream above the Horseshoe to where the Niagara River jostles down over a series of ledges in the grand and angry Canadian Rapids, a sight as tumultuous and as thrilling in its own fashion as the Falls themselves. He visited the big, white stone power-house to examine with the greatest interest the machinery that traps the tremendous latent power of the plunging water, harnesses it, and so turns the wheels of a thousand industries, and lights hundreds of towns.
Partly walking, partly riding in a car of the scenic tramway, he followed the line of the Falls and river downward to where the Whirlpool Rapids curdle and eddy within the deep walls of the gorge. Over on the American side he saw the castles and keeps of modern industry: power-houses and factories, springing up from the very rock of the cliff, and almost forming part of it. On the Canadian side the people have not let their utilitarian sense run away with them to such an extent. Where America edges the gorge with commercial buildings, Canada has constructed her beautiful promenade, which continues the comeliness of the Falls Park through a pretty residential district. America has Prospect Park and the very beautiful Goat Island Park on its side, but these are not extended along the gorge.
Below the Whirlpool Rapids the Prince descended to the level of the river; later, he came to the top of the gorge again, and crossed, swinging two hundred feet above the water on the spidery ropes of the aerial railways, the great pool at the end of the river canyon, into which the pent-up water pushes swirling before turning at right angles towards Lake Ontario.
The Prince did not go over to the American side, but America came to him. The white number-plates of New York State seemed to be everywhere on automobiles, even outnumbering the yellow of Ontario. One had the impression that every American motor-owner within gasolene radius had decided that he would take his Sunday spin to Niagara Falls, and on to the Canadian side of the Falls to boot.
American cars were coming over the bridges all day, and American owners waited cheerfully along the route to get a glimpse of "The Boy," as the American papers called the Prince. They joined themselves to the very friendly crowd of Canadians who gathered everywhere along the route, and their cheering, mingling with Canadian cheering, showed that friendliness is not an affair that frontiers can manipulate.
As a matter of fact, the frontier at Niagara is the most imaginary of lines. Now that the war is over there is no difficulty in getting to either side. And there is no change in atmosphere either. People and conditions are much the same, only on the American side our dollars cost us more.
Western Ontario is, in the main, the most British part of Canada. Its towns have British names, and the streets of the towns have British names, while their atmosphere and design are almost of the Home Counties. The countryside (if one overlooks the absence of hedges—though rows of upturned tree-roots with plants growing among them sometimes have the look of hedges) is the suave, domesticated countryside of England. England is in the very air. And at the first of these curiously English towns the Prince became an Indian chief.
Brantford, though it reminds one of a comely British country town, preferably one with a Church influence in it, is really the capital of the Six Nation Indians. It actually owes its name to Joseph Brant, the Mohawk chief, who, having fought his Indians on the side of the British—as the braves of the fierce and powerful Six Nations had always fought on the side of the British—in the War of Independence, marched his tribes from their old camping-grounds in the Mohawk Valley to this place, so that they could remain under British rule.
The Indians of the Six Nations still live in and about Brantford, for, though they have ceded away their lands to settlers, they are among the few of the aboriginal races that have thrived and not decayed under civilization. The Prince's visit to Brantford on Monday, October 20th, was nearly all a visit to the Mohawks, the leaders of the ancient Indian federation of six tribes.
This is not to say that the welcome given him by Canadians was not a great one. As a matter of fact, it was astonishing, and it was difficult to imagine how a small town like this could pack its streets with so many people. But Brantford is industrial and scientific also, as well as being Indian. After a strenuous reception, for instance, the Prince went along to the statue that shrines the town's claim to a place in the history of science. This was the memorial to Dr. Bell, who lived in Brantford and who invented the first telephone in Brantford. They will even show you the trees from which the first line over which the first spoken message sent, was strung.
But the colourful ceremonies of Brantford were those connected with the Mohawks. The Prince was taken out to the small, old wooden chapel that George III. erected for his loyal Mohawk allies. It is the oldest Protestant chapel in the Dominion. On its walls are painted prayers in Mohawk, and it contains an old register that King Edward had signed in 1861. The Prince added his own signature to this before going into the churchyard to see the grave of Joseph Brant.
In the little enclosure before the church were the youngest descendants of the loyal Joseph Brant: ranks of Mohawk boys in khaki, and small Mohawk girls in red and grey. They sang to the Prince in their own language, a singular guttural tongue rendered with an almost abnormal stoicism. The children did not move a muscle of lips or face as they chanted; it might have been a song rendered by graven images.
In the main square of Brantford the Prince was elected chief of the Six Nations. This ceremony was carried out upon a raised and beflagged platform about which a vast throng of pale-faces gathered. Becoming a chief of the Six Nations is no light matter. It is a thing that must be discussed in full with all ceremonies and accurate minutes. The pow-wow on the platform was rather long. Chiefs rose up and debated at leisure in the Iroquois tongue, while the pale-faces in the square, at first quite patient, began to demand in loud voices:
"We want our Prince. We want our Prince."
And to be truthful, not merely the pale-faces found the ceremony lengthy. Gathered on the platform were a number of Mohawk girls, delicate and pretty maidens, with the warmth of their race's colour glowing through the soft texture of their cheeks. They were there because they had thrown flowers in the pathway of the Prince. At first they were interested in this olden ceremony of their old race. Then they began to talk of the wages they were drawing in extremely modern Canadian stores and factories. Then they looked at the ceremony again, at the clothes the Indians wore, at the romance and colour of it, and they said, one to another:
"Say, why have those guys dressed up like that? What's it all about, anyhow? What's the use of this funny old business?"
The romantic may find some food for thought in this attitude of the modern Mohawk maid.
In the end, after a debate on the fitness of several names, the Prince, as president of the pow-wow, gave his vote for "Dawn of Morning," and became chief with that title. But apparently he did not become fully fledged until he had danced a ritual measure. A brother chief in bright yellow and a fine gravity, came forward to guide the Prince's steps, and the Prince, immediately entering into the spirit of the ceremony, joined with him in shuffling and bowing to and fro across the platform. Only after the congratulations from fellow-Mohawks and palefaces, did he leave the daïs to fight—there is no other word—his way through the dense and cheerful mass that packed the square almost to danger-point.
It was a splendid crowd, good-humoured and ardent. It had cheered every moment, though, perhaps, it had cheered more strongly at one moment. This was when an old Indian woman ran up to the Prince, crying: "I met your father and your grandfather, and I'm British too." At her words the Prince had taken the rose from his buttonhole and had presented it to her. And that delighted the crowd.
The fine weather of Monday gave way to pitiless rain on the morning of Tuesday, October 21st. All the same, the rain did not prevent the reception at Guelph from being warm and intensely interesting.
Guelph is one of the many comely and thriving towns of West Ontario, but its chiefest feature is its great Agricultural College that trains the scientific farmer, not of Ontario and Canada alone, but for many countries in the Western World. This college gave the Prince a captivating welcome.
It has men students, but it has many attractive and bonny girl students, also, and these helped to distinguish the day, that is, with a little help from the "movie" men.
The "movie" men who travelled with the train had captured the spectacle of the Prince's arrival at the station, and had driven off to the college to be in readiness to "shoot" when His Royal Highness arrived. They had ten minutes to wait. Not merely that, they had ten minutes to wait in the company of a bunch of the prettiest and liveliest girl students in West Ontario. "Movie" men are not of the hesitant class. Somewhere in the first seventy-five seconds they became old friends of the students who were filling the college windows with so much attraction. In one minute and forty-five seconds they had the girls in training for the Prince's arrival. They had hummed over the melody of what they declared was the Prince's favourite opera selection; a girl at a piano had picked up the tune, while the others practised harder than diva ever did.
When the Prince arrived the training proved worth while. He was saluted from a hundred laughing heads at a score of windows with the song that had followed him all over Canada. He drove into the College, not to the stirring strains of "Oh, Canada," but to the syncopated lilt of "Johnny's in Town."
The Prince was not altogether out of the youthful gaiety of the scene, for after the lunch, where the students had scrambled for souvenirs, a piece of sugar from his coffee cup, a stick of celery from his plate, even a piece of his pie, he made all these dashing young women gather about him in the group that was to make the commemorative photo, and a very jolly, laughing group it was.
And when he was about to leave, and in answer to a massed feminine chorus, this time chanting:
"We—want—a—holiday."
He called out cheerfully:
"All right. I'll fix that holiday." And he did.