Real estate agents recommend it as a little piece of England—­the island on which it stands is about the size of Great Britain—­but no England is set in any such seas or so fully charged with the mystery of the larger ocean beyond.  The high, still twilights along the beaches are out of the old East just under the curve of the world, and even in October the sun rises warm from the first.  Earth, sky, and water wait outside every man’s door to drag him out to play if he looks up from his work; and, though some other cities in the Dominion do not quite understand this immoral mood of Nature, men who have made their money in them go off to Victoria, and with the zeal of converts preach and preserve its beauties.

We went to look at a marine junk-store which had once been Esquimalt, a station of the British Navy.  It was reached through winding roads, lovelier than English lanes, along watersides and parkways any one of which would have made the fortune of a town.

‘Most cities,’ a man said, suddenly, ’lay out their roads at right angles.  We do in the business quarters.  What d’you think?’

’I fancy some of those big cities will have to spend millions on curved roads some day for the sake of a change,’ I said.  ’You’ve got what no money can buy.’

’That’s what the men tell us who come to live in Victoria.  And they’ve had experience.’

It is pleasant to think of the Western millionaire, hot from some gridiron of rectangular civilisation, confirming good Victorians in the policy of changing vistas and restful curves.

There is a view, when the morning mists peel off the harbour where the steamers tie up, or the Houses of Parliament on one hand, and a huge hotel on the other, which as an example of cunningly-fitted-in water-fronts and facades is worth a very long journey.  The hotel was just being finished.  The ladies’ drawing-room, perhaps a hundred feet by forty, carried an arched and superbly enriched plaster ceiling of knops and arabesques and interlacings, which somehow seemed familiar.

‘We saw a photo of it in Country Life,’ the contractor explained.  ’It seemed just what the room needed, so one of our plasterers, a Frenchman—­that’s him—­took and copied it.  It comes in all right, doesn’t it?’

About the time the noble original was put up in England Drake might have been sailing somewhere off this very coast.  So, you see, Victoria lawfully holds the copyright.

I tried honestly to render something of the colour, the gaiety, and the graciousness of the town and the island, but only found myself piling up unbelievable adjectives, and so let it go with a hundred other wonders and repented that I had wasted my time and yours on the anxious-eyed gentlemen who talked of ‘drawbacks.’  A verse cut out of a newspaper seems to sum up their attitude: 

  As the Land of Little Leisure
  Is the place where things are done,
  So the Land of Scanty Pleasure
  Is the place for lots of fun. 
  In the Land of Plenty Trouble
  People laugh as people should,
  But there’s some one always kicking
  In the Land of Heap Too Good!