ston were fighting
for the political supremacy of the Dominion. Appealed to, to settle
this dispute, Queen Victoria decided all feuds by selecting what had
been the old Bytown, but which was now Ottawa, as the official capital
of the Dominion.

Ottawa men pointed all this out to us, and declared that a town of such
artificial beginnings, and whose present population was made up of
civil servants and mixed Parliamentarians, could not be expected to
show real, red-blood enthusiasm.

A day later those Ottawa men met us in the high and handsome walls of
the Chateau Laurier, and they were entirely unrepentant. They were
even proud of their false prophecy, and asked us to join them in a
grape-juice and soda--the limit of the emotion of good fellowship in
Canada (anyhow publicly) is grape-juice and soda--in order that they
might explain to us how they never for a moment doubted that Ottawa
would show the enthusiasm it had shown.

"This is the Capital of Canada, sir. The home of our Parliament and
the Governor-General. It is the hub of loyalty and law. Of course it
would beat the band."

II

I don't know that I want to quarrel with Ottawa's joke, for I am awed
by the way it brought it off. Perhaps it brought it off on the Prince
also. If so he must have had a shock, and a delightful one. For the
taciturnity of Ottawa is a myth. When the Prince entered it on the
morning of Thursday, August 28th, it was as silent as a whirlwind
bombardment, and as reticent as a cyclone.

There were crowds, inevitably vast and cheering, with the invincible
good-humour of Canada. They captured him with a rush after he was
through with the formalities of being greeted by the Governor-General
and other notabilities, and had mounted a carriage behind the scarlet
outriders of Royalty. That carriage may have been more decorative but
it was no more purposeful than an automobile would be under the
circumstance. Even as the automobile, it went at a walking pace, with
the crowd pressing close around it.

It passed up from the swinging, open triangle that fronts the Chateau
Laurier Hotel and the station, over the bridge that spans the Rideau
Canal, and along the broad road lined with administration buildings and
clubs, to the spacious grass quadrangle about which the massive
Parliament buildings group themselves.

This quadrangle is a fit place to stage a pageant. It crowns a slow
hill that is actually a sharp bluff clothed in shrub