ere had been crowds,
and at times big crowds, all friendly and with an enthusiasm that was
French as well as Canadian.

There were naturally tracts of road in the country where people did not
gather in force, but almost everywhere there were some. Sometimes it
was a family gathered by a pretty house draped with flags. Sometimes
it was a village, making up with the flags in their hands for the
hanging flags short notice had prevented their sporting.

On an open stretch of road the Prince would come abreast of a convent
in the fields. By the fence of the convent all the little girls would
be ranked, dressed, sometimes, in national ribbons, and anyhow carrying
flags, and with them would be the nuns. Or if the convent was not a
teaching order, the nuns would be by themselves, forming a delightful
picture of quiet respect on the porch or along the garden wall.

Boys' schools had the inmates gathered at the road-edge in jolly mobs,
though some of these had a semi-military dignity, because of the quaint
and kepi-ed uniform of the school, that made the boys look like cadets
out of a picture by Detaille.

The seminaries had their flocks of black fledglings drawn up under the
professor-priests, and the sober black of these embryo priests had not
the slightest restriction on their enthusiasm.

There were crowds everywhere on that extraordinary ride, but it was in
Montreal itself that the throngs reached immense proportions. From the
first moment of arrival, when the Prince in mufti rode out from under
the clangour of "God Bless the Prince of Wales" played on the bells of
St. George's Church, that hob-nobs with the station, crowds were thick
about the route. As he swung from Dominion Square (in which the
station stands) into the Regent Street of Montreal, St. Catherine
Street, crowds of employes crowded the windows of the big and fine
stores, and added their welcome to the mass on the sidewalks.

Short notice had curtailed decoration, but the enthusiastic employes
(mainly feminine) of one tall store strove to rectify the lack by
arming themselves with flags and stationing themselves at every window.
Balancing perilously, they waited until the Prince came level, and then
set the whole face of the tall building fluttering with Union Jacks.

From these streets, impressive in their sense of vigour and industry,
the procession of cars mounted through the residential quarter to Mount
Royal Park. Here in the presence of a bi