a
partiality for it, d'y' remember, up there to the Collegiate? I used to
think it'd be fine to travel with samples, those days. But you were dead
gone on the law. 'N by all reports it pans out pretty well don't it?"

The young men had taken their way among the shifting crowd together.
Lorne Murchison, although there was something too large about him
for the town's essential stamp, made by contrast, as he threaded the
desultory groups of country people, a type of the conventional and the
formed; his companion glanced at him now and then with admiration. The
values of carriage and of clothes are relative: in Fifth Avenue Lorne
would have looked countrified, in Piccadilly colonial. Districts are
imaginable, perhaps not in this world, where the frequenters of even
those fashionable thoroughfares would attract glances of curiosity
by their failure to achieve the common standard in such things. Lorne
Murchison, to dismiss the matter, was well up to the standard of Elgin,
though he wore his straw hat quite on the back of his head and buried
both hands in his trousers pockets. His eye was full of pleasant easy
familiarity with the things he saw, and ready to see larger things; it
had that beam of active inquiry, curious but never amazed that marks
the man likely to expand his horizons. Meanwhile he was on capital terms
with his little world, which seemed to take pleasure in hailing him by
his Christian name; even morose Jim Webster, who had failed three times
in groceries, said "Morning, Lorne" with a look of toleration. He moved
alertly; the poise of his head was sanguine; the sun shone on him; the
timidest soul came nearer to him. He and Elmore Crow, who walked beside
him, had gone through the lower forms of the Elgin Collegiate Institute
together, that really "public" kind of school which has so much to do
with reassorting the classes of a new country. The Collegiate Institute
took in raw material and turned out teachers, more teachers than
anything. The teachers taught, chiefly in rural districts where they
could save money, and with the money they saved changed themselves into
doctors, Fellows of the University, mining engineers. The Collegiate
Institute was a potential melting-pot: you went in as your simple
opportunities had made you; how you shaped coming out depended upon what
was hidden in the core of you. You could not in any case be the same
as your father before you; education in a new country is too powerful
a st