The St. Lawrence on the last day of the voyage played up nobly.  The maples along its banks had turned—­blood red and splendid as the banners of lost youth.  Even the oak is not more of a national tree than the maple, and the sight of its welcome made the folks aboard still more happy.  A dry wind brought along all the clean smell of their Continent-mixed odours of sawn lumber, virgin earth, and wood-smoke; and they snuffed it, and their eyes softened as they, identified point after point along their own beloved River—­places where they played and fished and amused themselves in holiday time.  It must be pleasant to have a country of one’s very own to show off.  Understand, they did not in any way boast, shout, squeak, or exclaim, these even-voiced returned men and women.  They were simply and unfeignedly glad to see home again, and they said:  ‘Isn’t it lovely?  Don’t you think it’s beautiful?  We love it.’

At Quebec there is a sort of place, much infested by locomotives, like a coal-chute, whence rise the heights that Wolfe’s men scaled on their way to the Plains of Abraham.  Perhaps of all the tide-marks in all our lands the affair of Quebec touches the heart and the eye more nearly than any other.  Everything meets there; France, the jealous partner of England’s glory by land and sea for eight hundred years; England, bewildered as usual, but for a wonder not openly opposing Pitt, who knew; those other people, destined to break from England as soon as the French peril was removed; Montcalm himself, doomed and resolute; Wolfe, the inevitable trained workman appointed for the finish; and somewhere in the background one James Cook, master of H.M.S. Mercury, making beautiful and delicate charts of the St. Lawrence River.

For these reasons the Plains of Abraham are crowned with all sorts of beautiful things—­including a jail and a factory.  Montcalm’s left wing is marked by the jail, and Wolfe’s right by the factory.  There is, happily, now a movement on foot to abolish these adornments and turn the battle-field and its surroundings into a park, which by nature and association would be one of the most beautiful in our world.

Yet, in spite of jails on the one side and convents on the other and the thin black wreck of the Quebec Railway Bridge, lying like a dumped car-load of tin cans in the river, the Eastern Gate to Canada is noble with a dignity beyond words.  We saw it very early, when the under sides of the clouds turned chilly pink over a high-piled, brooding, dusky-purple city.  Just at the point of dawn, what looked like the Sultan Harun-al-Raschid’s own private shallop, all spangled with coloured lights, stole across the iron-grey water, and disappeared into the darkness of a slip.  She came out again in three minutes, but the full day had come too; so she snapped off her masthead, steering and cabin electrics, and turned into a dingy white ferryboat, full of cold passengers.  I spoke to a Canadian about her.  ’Why, she’s