ubly dangerous beneath the spring rains. He wards off their strokes
with enormous brattices of wood, wing-walls of logs bolted together, and
such other contraptions as experience teaches. He bears the giants no
malice; they do their work, he his. What bothers him a little is that
the wind of their blows sometimes rips pines out of the opposite
hill-sides--explodes, as it were, a whole valley. He thinks, however, he
can fix things so as to split large avalanches into little ones.

Another man, to whom I did not talk, sticks in my memory. He had for
years and years inspected trains at the head of a heavyish grade in the
mountains--though not half so steep as the Hex[4]--where all brakes are
jammed home, and the cars slither warily for ten miles. Tire-troubles
there would be inconvenient, so he, as the best man, is given the
heaviest job--monotony and responsibility combined. He did me the honour
of wanting to speak to me, but first he inspected his train--on all
fours with a hammer. By the time he was satisfied of the integrity of
the underpinnings it was time for us to go; and all that I got was a
friendly wave of the hand--a master craftsman's sign, you might call it.

[Footnote 4: Hex River, South Africa.]

Canada seems full of this class of materialist.

Which reminds me that the other day I saw the Lady herself in the shape
of a tall woman of twenty-five or six, waiting for her tram on a street
corner. She wore her almost flaxen-gold hair waved, and parted low on
the forehead, beneath a black astrachan toque, with a red enamel
maple-leaf hatpin in one side of it. This was the one touch of colour
except the flicker of a buckle on the shoe. The dark, tailor-made dress
had no trinkets or attachments, but fitted perfectly. She stood for
perhaps a minute without any movement, both hands--right bare, left
gloved--hanging naturally at her sides, the very fingers still, the
weight of the superb body carried evenly on both feet, and the profile,
which was that of Gudrun or Aslauga, thrown out against a dark stone
column. What struck me most, next to the grave, tranquil eyes, was her
slow, unhurried breathing in the hurry about her. She was evidently a
regular fare, for when her tram stopped she smiled at the lucky
conductor; and the last I saw of her was a flash of the sun on the red
maple-leaf, the full face still lighted by that smile, and her hair very
pale gold against the dead black fur. But the power of the mouth, the