d the canned beef and pork and beans with
which I had to regale myself en route.

Jaded, travel-weary and grimy, I reached the end of my journey. It was
late in the evening. I tumbled out of the train and into the first
hotel bus that yawned for me, and not once did I look out of the window
to see what kind of a city I had arrived at.

I came to myself at the entrance to a magnificent and palatial hotel;
too much so, by far, I fancied, for my scantily-filled purse. But I
was past the minding stage, and I knew I could always make a change on
the morrow, if so be it a change were necessary.

And then I began to think,--what mattered it anyway? What were a few
paltry sovereigns between one and poverty? Comforting thought,--a man
could not have anything less than nothing.

I registered, ordered a bath, a shave, a haircut, a jolly good supper
and a bed; and, oh! how I enjoyed them all! Surely this was the most
wonderful city in the world, for never did bath, or shave, or supper,
or bed feel so delicious as these did.

I swooned away at last from sheer pleasure.

The recuperative powers of youth are marvellously quick. I was up and
out to view the city almost as soon as the sun was touching the
snow-tipped tops of the magnificent mountain peaks which were miles
away yet seemed to stand sentinels at the end of the street down which
I walked. I was up and out long ere the sun had gilded the waters of
the broad inlet which separated Vancouver from its baby sister to the
north of it.

The prospect pleased me; there was freedom in the air, expanse,
vastness, but,--it was still a city with a city's artifices and,
consequently, not what I was seeking. I desired the natural life; not
the roughness, the struggle, the matching of crafty wits, the throbbing
blood and the straining sinews,--but the solitude, the quiet, the
chance for thought and observation, the wilds, the woods and the sea.

As I returned to breakfast, I wondered if I should find them,--and
where.

In the dining-room, during the course of my breakfast,--the first real
breakfast I had partaken of in Canada,--my attention was diverted to a
tall, well-groomed, muscular-looking man, who sat at a table nearby.
He looked a considerable bit on the sunny side of fifty. He was clean
shaven, his hair was black tinged with grey, and his eyes were keen and
kindly.

Every time I glanced in his direction, I found him looking over at me
in an amused sort of way.