oratory shows us the same alertness, swift flight, and clean delivery as a thrown boomerang.  I had half expected in Canadian speeches some survival of the Redskin’s elaborate appeal to Suns, Moons, and Mountains—­touches of grandiosity and ceremonial invocations.  But nothing that I heard was referable to any primitive stock.  There was a dignity, a restraint, and, above all, a weight in it, rather curious when one thinks of the influences to which the land lies open.  Red it was not; French it was not; but a thing as much by itself as the speakers.

So with the Canadian’s few gestures and the bearing of his body.  During the (Boer) war one watched the contingents from every point of view, and, most likely, drew wrong inferences.  It struck me then that the Canadian, even when tired, slacked off less than the men from the hot countries, and while resting did not lie on his back or his belly, but rather on his side, a leg doubled under him, ready to rise in one surge.

This time while I watched assemblies seated, men in hotels and passers-by, I fancied that he kept this habit of semi-tenseness at home among his own; that it was the complement of the man’s still countenance, and his even, lowered voice.  Looking at their footmarks on the ground they seem to throw an almost straight track, neither splayed nor in-toed, and to set their feet down with a gentle forward pressure, rather like the Australian’s stealthy footfall.  Talking among themselves, or waiting for friends, they did not drum with their fingers, fiddle with their feet, or feel the hair on their faces.  These things seem trivial enough, but when breeds are in the making everything is worth while.  A man told me once—­but I never tried the experiment—­that each of our Four Races light and handle fire in their own way.

Small wonder we differ!  Here is a people with no people at their backs, driving the great world-plough which wins the world’s bread up and up over the shoulder of the world—­a spectacle, as it might be, out of some tremendous Norse legend.  North of them lies Niflheim’s enduring cold, with the flick and crackle of the Aurora for Bifrost Bridge that Odin and the Aesir visited.  These people also go north year by year, and drag audacious railways with them.  Sometimes they burst into good wheat or timber land, sometimes into mines of treasure, and all the North is foil of voices—­as South Africa was once—­telling discoveries and making prophecies.

When their winter comes, over the greater part of this country outside the cities they must sit still, and eat and drink as the Aesir did.  In summer they cram twelve months’ work into six, because between such and such dates certain far rivers will shut, and, later, certain others, till, at last, even the Great Eastern Gate at Quebec locks, and men must go in and out by the side-doors at Halifax and St. John.  These are conditions that make for extreme boldness, but not for extravagant boastings.