“Boom nothing.  I don’t mean to say there’s anything the matter with the country; there ain’t; but you’ve got to get up just as early in the mornings out there as y’do anywhere, far’s I noticed.  An’ it’s a lonesome life.  Now I am back I don’t know but little old Ontario’s good enough for me.  ’N I hear you’ve taken up the law, Lorne.  Y’always had a partiality for it, d’y’ remember, up there to the Collegiate?  I used to think it’d be fine to travel with samples, those days.  But you were dead gone on the law.  ’N by all reports it pans out pretty well don’t it?”

The young men had taken their way among the shifting crowd together.  Lorne Murchison, although there was something too large about him for the town’s essential stamp, made by contrast, as he threaded the desultory groups of country people, a type of the conventional and the formed; his companion glanced at him now and then with admiration.  The values of carriage and of clothes are relative:  in Fifth Avenue Lorne would have looked countrified, in Piccadilly colonial.  Districts are imaginable, perhaps not in this world, where the frequenters of even those fashionable thoroughfares would attract glances of curiosity by their failure to achieve the common standard in such things.  Lorne Murchison, to dismiss the matter, was well up to the standard of Elgin, though he wore his straw hat quite on the back of his head and buried both hands in his trousers pockets.  His eye was full of pleasant easy familiarity with the things he saw, and ready to see larger things; it had that beam of active inquiry, curious but never amazed that marks the man likely to expand his horizons.  Meanwhile he was on capital terms with his little world, which seemed to take pleasure in hailing him by his Christian name; even morose Jim Webster, who had failed three times in groceries, said “Morning, Lorne” with a look of toleration.  He moved alertly; the poise of his head was sanguine; the sun shone on him; the timidest soul came nearer to him.  He and Elmore Crow, who walked beside him, had gone through the lower forms of the Elgin Collegiate Institute together, that really “public” kind of school which has so much to do with reassorting the classes of a new country.  The Collegiate Institute took in raw material and turned out teachers, more teachers than anything.  The teachers taught, chiefly in rural districts where they could save money, and with the money they saved changed themselves into doctors, Fellows of the University, mining engineers.  The Collegiate Institute was a potential melting-pot:  you went in as your simple opportunities had made you; how you shaped coming out depended upon what was hidden in the core of you.  You could not in any case be the same as your father before you; education in a new country is too powerful a stimulant for that, working upon material too plastic and too hypothetical; it is not yet a normal force, with an operation to be reckoned on with confidence.  It