y stimulated the retail trade of the
city. The Governor-General was in the habit of taking a house in
Montreal for the Carnival, and my brother-in-law was lent the home of a
hospitable sugar magnate. The dining-room of this house, in which its
owner had allowed full play to his Oriental imagination and love of
colour, was so singular that it merits a few words of description. The
room was square, with a domed ceiling. It was panelled in polished
satinwood to a height of about five feet. Above the panelling were
placed twelve owls in carved and silvered wood, each one about two feet
high, supporting gas-standards. Rose-coloured silk was stretched from
the panelling up to the heavy frieze, consisting of "swags" of fruit
and foliage modelled in high relief, and brilliantly coloured in their
natural hues. The domed ceiling was painted sky-blue, covered with
golden stars, gold and silver suns and moons, and the signs of the
Zodiac. I may add that the effect of this curious apartment was not
such as to warrant any one trying to reproduce it. The house also
contained a white marble swimming bath; an unnecessary adjunct, I
should have thought, to a dwelling built for winter occupation in
Montreal.

The Ice-Castle erected by the Municipality was really a joy to the eye.
It was rather larger than, say, the Westminster Guildhall, and had a
tower eighty feet high. It was an admirable reproduction of a Gothic
castle, designed and built by a competent architect, with barbican,
battlements, and machiocolaions all complete, the whole of gleaming,
transparent ice-blocks, a genuine thing of beauty. One of the principal
events of the Carnival was the storming of the Ice-Castle by the
snow-shoe clubs of Montreal. Hundreds of snow-shoers, in their
rainbow-hued blanket suits, advanced in line on the castle and fired
thousands of Roman candles at their objective, which returned the fire
with rockets innumerable, and an elaborate display of fireworks,
burning continually Bengal lights of various colours within its
translucent walls, and spouting gold and silver rain on its assailants.
It really was a gorgeous feast of colour for the eye, a most entrancing
spectacle, with all this polychrome glow seen against the dead-white
field of snow which covered Dominion Square, in the crystal clearness
of a Canadian winter night, with the thermometer down anywhere.

Another annual feature of the Carnival was the great fancy-dress
skating fete in the co