ky, lean silhouette against a
vast flare of water and sky. On the same spot less than two hundred
years ago, that singular, overbuilt top head and sharply tapering,
elongated oval of a face might have been that of some aristocratic red
man, deeply serious on the eve of a tribal war.

The little blank spots in Meighen's temperament are things that people
like to talk about; when the same idioms in an average man would be set
down as mild insanity. Rumour says for instance that every now and
then he must be watched for fear he go to Parliament without a hat.
Why not? It is only a British custom to wear a hat in the Commons
except when making a speech. A bareheaded, even a bald-headed, Premier
may be a great man. Meighen's negligence in the matter of a hat
perhaps comes of the bother of finding the clothes-brush at the same
time. Since Mackenzie Bowell, Canada has never had a Premier so
naturally oblivious of sartorial style; though his later appearances
suggest that even he has fallen into the mode of well-dressed Premiers.
In his early law days at Portage it is said that one evening when Mrs.
Meighen was at a concert, he was given the first baby to mind, that
when the baby cried he marked a paragraph in a law book he was reading,
stole into the bedroom and took the baby over to a neighbour's house;
that when he was asked later where the infant was he gradually
remembered that he had put the child somewhere--now where was it?
There is some other half forgotten tale of the strange garb in which he
turned up at a friend's wedding, even before he was famous enough to be
able to do that sort of thing with any degree of contempt for the
conventional forms.

If Meighen remains Premier of Canada long enough, no doubt some really
apocryphal yarns will arise out of these little idiosyncracies, just as
legends wove themselves about John A. Macdonald, and Laurier. I
remember that the clothes Meighen wore the day I shook hands with him
were dingy brown that made him look like a moulting bobolink; that he
had not taken the trouble to shave because a sleeping car is such an
awkward place for a razor, and it is much better for a Premier to wear
bristles than court-plaster. Some one will be sure to remark that the
Premier travels in a private car. Arthur Meighen never seems like that
sort of Premier. One would almost expect him to choose an upper berth
because some less lean and agile person might need the lower.

No doubt m