Its tiny station, through which the Transcontinental trains thunder, is
faced by a long, straggling green, and fringing the green is a row of
wooden shops and houses equally straggling. They have a somnolent and
spiritless air. Behind is a wedge of pretty dwellings stretching down
to the river, tailing off into an Indian encampment by the stream,
where, about dingy tepees, a dozen or so stoic children play.

There are three hundred souls in the village, mainly Finns and Indians
become Canadians. They are not the Indians of Fenimore Cooper, but men
who wear peaked caps, bright blouse shirts or sweaters, with broad
yellow, blue and white stripes (a popular article of wear all over
Canada), and women who wear the shin skirts and silks of civilization.
Only here and there one sees old squaw women, stout and brown and bent,
with the plaid shawl of modernity making up for the moccasins of their
ancient race.

Small though it is, or perhaps because it is so small and observable,
Nipigon is an example of the amalgam from which the Canadian race is
being fused. We went, for instance, to a dance given by the Finns in
their varnished, brown-wood hall on the Saturday night. It was an
attractive and interesting evening. The whole of the village, without
distinction, appeared to be there. And they mixed. Indian women in
the silk stockings, high heels and glowing frocks of suburbia, danced
(and danced well) with high cheek-boned, monosyllabic Finns in grey
sweaters, workaday trousers and coats and bubble-toed boots. A vivid
Canadian girl in semi-evening dress went round in the jazz with a guard
of the Royal train. A policeman from the train danced with a Finnish
girl, demure and well-dressed, who might have been anything from the
leader of local Society to a clerk (i.e., a counter hand) in one of the
shops. For all we knew, the plumber might have been dancing with the
leading citizen's daughter, and the local Astor with the local
dressmaker's assistant.

In any case, it didn't matter. In Canada they don't think about that
sort of thing. They were all unconcerned and happy in the big,
generous spirit of equality that makes Canada the home of one big
family rather than the dwelling-place of different classes and social
grades. This fact was not new to us; naturally, we had seen and mixed
with Canadians in hotels and on the street elsewhere. In those
gathering-places of humanity, the hotels, we had lived with the big,