Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/363

Rh The Princess Louise drew up at the rough log wharf, choked with immense piles of white-pine planks—"lumber," as the American language gracefully phrases it; and even as we reached the tiny quay we saw our hostess in her row-boat, already pulling round a granite bluff from her retreat to meet us. By private arrangement with the captain, indeed—so sweetly simple and domestic is life in these new countries—the engineer "scooted," or blew, his whistle three times as he passed the lighthouse whenever he had visitors on board for our friends' chalet. The moment the "scoot" is heard on the cliff, the chalet folks put out their boat at once, and row round to the landing-place to take up their visitors without delay on arrival.

It is one of the charms of our vast England that here a man is lost in the crowd. The individual withers (much to the advantage of his own comfort), and the world is more and more. You can walk along the streets of London any day with the serene consciousness that no-body knows you or cares a pin about you, that to all the passers-by you are merely another nameless passer-by, that your personality is wholly merged in the recognition of your abstract existence as a single unit of assorted humanity. That, I say, gives a man a delightful sense of breadth and freedom. You feel yourself planted, as the inimitable Prince Florestan aptly phrases it, "at the strategic center of the universe, for so I may be allowed to style Rupert Street," with your individuality wholly obliterated, in the general consciousness of our common human citizenship. But once in a while, as an incident of a summer holiday, it is not wholly unpleasant, by way of contrast, to find one's self for a time in such a narrower world of mutual recognition, where the purser knows immediately you are going to stop with your friends in their summer quarters, and gives notice to the engineer to blow the whistle thrice accordingly as you pass the chalet where they presently abide. A certain patriarchal colonial note in it all attracts one's not unfavorable attention. If you were a duke in England, the constituted authorities would refuse to whistle for you; it is agreeable now and again to feel yourself a duke, and to be recognized and whistled for with more than ducal consideration. I much prefer it to the South Coast Railway style, where my urbane inquiry, "Is this the train for Brighton, please?" meets with the crushing response from guard or porter, "All right! third class forward!"

We disembarked from the Princess Louise, and took our seats in the chalet row-boat. Our hostess pulled; politeness compelled me to offer myself as an unworthy substitute, but, when she firmly declined to surrender the sculls, I felt a secret twinge of satisfaction, for though it's one thing to pilot a dingey from Oxford to Sandford Lasher, it's quite another thing to pull a heavy hen-coop against the big waves of the full St. Lawrence on a windy evening. Canadian ladies think nothing of a mile or two of rowing, or of a stiff breeze; and modesty recognized the palpable fact that the sculls were in far more