in no way lessened. They were content with having seen
"the cute little feller" as some of them called him, and made the most
of that experience by listening to, and swopping anecdotes about, him.

Most of these centred round his accessibility. One typical story was
about a soldier, who, having met him in France, stepped out from the
crowd and hopped on to the footboard of his car to say "How d'y' do?"
The Prince gripped the khaki man's hand at once, and shaking it and
holding the soldier safely on the car with his other hand, he talked
while they went along. Then both men saluted, and the soldier hopped
off again and returned to the crowd.

"It was just as if you saw me in an automobile and came along to tell
me something," said the man who told me the story. "There was no
king-stuff about it. And that's why he gets us. There isn't a sheet
of ice between us and him."

Another man said to me:

"If you'd told me a month ago that anybody was going to get this sort
of a reception I should have smiled and called you an innocent. I
would have told you the Canadians aren't built that way. We're a
hard-bitten, independent, irreverent breed. We don't go about shouting
over anybody.... But now we've gone wild over him. And I can't
understand it. He's our sort. He has no side. We like to treat men
as men, and that's the way he meets us."

III

The long week-end, so strenuously begun, did, however, give the Prince
his opportunity for rest and recreation. He had a quiet time in the
home of the Governor-General at the beautiful Rideau Hall, the
attractive and spacious grounds of which are part of the untrammelled
expanses of the lovely Rockhill Park which hangs on a cliff and keeps
company with the shining Ottawa river for miles to the east of the
city. Apart from sightseeing, and golfing and dancing at the pretty
County Club across the Ottawa on the Hull side, he attempted no program
until Monday morning.

Ottawa is not so virile in atmosphere as other of the Canadian cities.
Its artificial heart, the Parliament area, seems to absorb most of its
vitality. Its architecture is massed very effectively on the hill
whose steep cliffs in a spray of shrubs, rise at the knee of the two
rivers, the Ottawa and the Rideau, but outside the radius of the
Parliament buildings and the few, fine, brisk, lively streets that
serve them, the town fades disappointingly eastward, westward and
northward into spiritless stree