und the East a strange place, inhabited
by people not easy to get on with, and removed from the British
tradition--and so on...?

This singular state of things may seem queer to the Briton, but I think
it is easily explainable. In the first place, Canada is so vast that
her people, even though they be on the same continent, are as removed
from immediate intimacy as the Kentish man is from the man in a Russian
province. And not only does great distance make for lack of knowledge,
but the fact that each province is self-contained and feeds upon
itself, so to speak, in the matter of news and so on, makes the citizen
in Ontario, or Quebec, or New Brunswick, regard the people of the West
as living in a distant and strange land.

The Canadian, too, is intensely loyal to Canada; that means he is
intensely jealous for her reputation. He warned us against all
possibilities, I think, so that we should be ready for any
disappointment.

There was not the slightest need for warning. Whether East or West,
Canada was solid in its welcome, and, as far as I am able to judge,
there is no difference at all in the texture of human habit and mind
East or West. There is the same fine, sturdy quality of loyalty and
hospitality over the whole Dominion. Canada is Canada all through.

Edmonton is a fine, lusty place. It is the prairie town in its teens.
It has not yet put off its coltish air. It is Winnipeg just leaving
school, and has the wonderful precocity of these eager towns of the
West. It is running almost before it has learnt to walk.

While full-blooded Indians still move in its streets, it is putting up
buildings worthy of a European metropolis. It has opened big
up-to-date stores and public offices by the side of streets that are
yet the mere stamped earth of the untutored plain.

Along its main boulevard, Jasper Avenue, slip the astonishing excess of
automobiles one has learnt to expect in Canadian towns. A brisk
electric tram service weaves the mass of street movement together, and
at night over all shines an exuberance of electric light.

That main street is tingling with modernity. Its stores, its
music-halls, its "movie" theatres, and its hotels glitter with the
nervous intensity of a spirit avid of the latest ideas.

Fringing the canyon of the brown North Saskatchewan River is a
beautiful automobile road, winding among pretty residential plots and
comely enough for any town.

Yet swing out in a motor for a