th Africa was to be developed--when men laid
out railways, and gave orders for engines, and fresh rolling-stock, and
labour, and believed gloriously in the future? It is true the hope was
murdered afterward, but--multiply that good hour by a thousand, and you
will have some idea of how it feels to be in Canada--a place which even
an 'Imperial' Government cannot kill. I had the luck to be shown some
things from the inside--to listen to the details of works projected; the
record of works done. Above all, I saw what had actually been achieved
in the fifteen years since I had last come that way. One advantage of a
new land is that it makes you feel older than Time. I met cities where
there had been nothing--literally, absolutely nothing, except, as the
fairy tales say, 'the birds crying, and the grass waving in the wind.'
Villages and hamlets had grown to great towns, and the great towns
themselves had trebled and quadrupled. And the railways rubbed their
hands and cried, like the Afrites of old, 'Shall we make a city where
no city is; or render flourishing a city that is dasolate?' They do it
too, while, across the water, gentlemen, never forced to suffer one
day's physical discomfort in all their lives, pipe up and say, 'How
grossly materialistic!'

I wonder sometimes whether any eminent novelist, philosopher, dramatist,
or divine of to-day has to exercise half the pure imagination, not to
mention insight, endurance, and self-restraint, which is accepted
without comment in what is called 'the material exploitation' of a new
country. Take only the question of creating a new city at the junction
of two lines--all three in the air. The mere drama of it, the play of
the human virtues, would fill a book. And when the work is finished,
when the city is, when the new lines embrace a new belt of farms, and
the tide of the Wheat has rolled North another unexpected degree, the
men who did it break off, without compliments, to repeat the joke
elsewhere.

I had some talk with a youngish man whose business it was to train
avalanches to jump clear of his section of the track. Thor went to
Jotunheim only once or twice, and he had his useful hammer Miolnr with
him. This Thor lived in Jotunheim among the green-ice-crowned peaks of
the Selkirks--where if you disturb the giants at certain seasons of the
year, by making noises, they will sit upon you and all your fine
emotions. So Thor watches them glaring under the May sun, or dull and
do