Does any one remember that joyful strong confidence after the war, when it seemed that, at last, South Africa was to be developed—­when men laid out railways, and gave orders for engines, and fresh rolling-stock, and labour, and believed gloriously in the future?  It is true the hope was murdered afterward, but—­multiply that good hour by a thousand, and you will have some idea of how it feels to be in Canada—­a place which even an ‘Imperial’ Government cannot kill.  I had the luck to be shown some things from the inside—­to listen to the details of works projected; the record of works done.  Above all, I saw what had actually been achieved in the fifteen years since I had last come that way.  One advantage of a new land is that it makes you feel older than Time.  I met cities where there had been nothing—­literally, absolutely nothing, except, as the fairy tales say, ‘the birds crying, and the grass waving in the wind.’  Villages and hamlets had grown to great towns, and the great towns themselves had trebled and quadrupled.  And the railways rubbed their hands and cried, like the Afrites of old, ’Shall we make a city where no city is; or render flourishing a city that is dasolate?’ They do it too, while, across the water, gentlemen, never forced to suffer one day’s physical discomfort in all their lives, pipe up and say, ’How grossly materialistic!’

I wonder sometimes whether any eminent novelist, philosopher, dramatist, or divine of to-day has to exercise half the pure imagination, not to mention insight, endurance, and self-restraint, which is accepted without comment in what is called ‘the material exploitation’ of a new country.  Take only the question of creating a new city at the junction of two lines—­all three in the air.  The mere drama of it, the play of the human virtues, would fill a book.  And when the work is finished, when the city is, when the new lines embrace a new belt of farms, and the tide of the Wheat has rolled North another unexpected degree, the men who did it break off, without compliments, to repeat the joke elsewhere.

I had some talk with a youngish man whose business it was to train avalanches to jump clear of his section of the track.  Thor went to Jotunheim only once or twice, and he had his useful hammer Miolnr with him.  This Thor lived in Jotunheim among the green-ice-crowned peaks of the Selkirks—­where if you disturb the giants at certain seasons of the year, by making noises, they will sit upon you and all your fine emotions.  So Thor watches them glaring under the May sun, or dull and doubly dangerous beneath the spring rains.  He wards off their strokes with enormous brattices of wood, wing-walls of logs bolted together, and such other contraptions as experience teaches.  He bears the giants no malice; they do their work, he his.  What bothers him a little is that the wind of their blows sometimes rips pines out of the opposite hill-sides—­explodes, as it were, a whole valley.  He thinks, however, he can fix things so as to split large avalanches into little ones.