am going to put all their counsel
together and compose a really great one. It will not be disjointed,
but will flow along without a break in the smooth, natural way people
talk when they are alone with their families. It shall concern psychic
phenomena, yearnings, root-causes, the untrammelled life, strange
decadencies, and things like that. It shall be paradoxical,
epigrammatic, erudite, even vitriolic. I will pierce the self-conceit
of these Canadians and tell them they have need to mend their manners;
that they are primitive beasts--even _Diprotodons_.

Now the _Diprotodon_ was a kind of ferocious kangaroo, carnivorous and
predaceous, which lived in the Tertiary Period and had a skull three
feet in length. Those who are not of this species, I shall designate
as fanatics who cling to worn-out shibboleths over which they snarl
like pestilent dogs; or prigs who affect neurotic cults that are
exceedingly false and not native to this country. I will be superior
and insufferably arrogant so that they may be vastly annoyed with me
and rage like the Psalmist's "heathen." I shall not be kindly to any,
nor say them fair words, no matter how much I may desire to, nor how
much it hurts me to tell lies.

Then will the wise people take their pens in hand to say that "This
writer is possessed of the discriminating sense to an extraordinary
degree. She has vision, luminosity, verve, technique, and artistic
self-restraint--these, and other palpable qualities which bid us hope,
in spite of all which has been said to the contrary, that the time is
not so hopelessly remote when Canada may lay some small claim to having
a literature of her own."

Oh Me! Oh Me! This is what they will say, and I will laugh in my
throat and in my sleeves. I win not care the point of one pencil what
they say, so long as they refrain from using the adjective breezy.
When a northern woman goes visiting and the wise people wish to be
kind, they all apply this word to her. When the dubious visitor looks
into the dictionary for the exact meaning of breeze, she finds it
stands for either an uproar or a gentle gale. People have been
murdered for less obvious errors, so that all wise people will please
to be forewarned.

If you were to ask here what the Indian woman wished to write in a book
about the white people, I would not be able to tell you, for, at this
juncture, we all forgot to talk and crowded to the prow of the vessel
to see a moose tha