Lady Merton, Colonist | Page 2

haven't got a name--and they're so endless!--and the place is so big!--and the people so few!--and the chances are so many--and so queer!" said Elizabeth Merton laughing.
"What sort of chances?"
"Chances of the future."
"Hasn't got any chances!" said Philip Gaddesden, keeping his hands in his pockets.
"Hasn't it? Owl!" Lady Merton neatly pinched the arm nearest to her. "As I've explained to you many times before, this is the Hinterland of Ontario--and it's only been surveyed, except just along the railway, a few years ago--and it's as rich as rich--"
"I say, I wish you wouldn't reel out the guide-book like that!" grumbled the somnolent person beside her. "As if I didn't know all about the Cobalt mines, and that kind of stuff."
"Did you make any money out of them, Phil?"
"No--but the other fellows did. That's my luck."
"Never mind, there'll be heaps more directly--hundreds." She stretched out her hand vaguely towards an enchanting distance--hill beyond hill, wood beyond wood; everywhere the glimmer of water in the hollows; everywhere the sparkle of fresh leaf, the shining of the birch trunks among the firs, the greys and purples of limestone rock; everywhere, too, the disfiguring stain of fire, fire new or old, written, now on the mouldering stumps of trees felled thirty years ago when the railway was making, now on the young stems of yesterday.
"I want to see it all in a moment of time," Elizabeth continued, still above herself. "An air-ship, you know, Philip--and we should see it all in a day, from here to James Bay. A thousand miles of it--stretched below us--just waiting for man! And we'd drop down into an undiscovered lake, and give it a name--one of our names--and leave a letter under a stone. And then in a hundred years, when the settlers come, they'd find it, and your name--or mine--would live forever."
"I forbid you to take any liberties with my name, Elizabeth! I've something better to do with it than waste it on a lake in--what do you call it?--the 'Hinterland of Ontario.'" The young man mocked his sister's tone.
Elizabeth laughed and was silent.
The train sped on, at its steady pace of some thirty miles an hour. The spring day was alternately sunny and cloudy; the temperature was warm, and the leaves were rushing out. Elizabeth Merton felt the spring in her veins, an indefinable joyousness and expectancy; but she was conscious also of another intoxication--a heat of romantic perception kindled in her by this vast new country through which she was passing. She was a person of much travel, and many experiences; and had it been prophesied to her a year before this date that she could feel as she was now feeling, she would not have believed it. She was then in Rome, steeped in, ravished by the past--assisted by what is, in its way, the most agreeable society in Europe. Here she was absorbed in a rushing present; held by the vision of a colossal future; and society had dropped out of her ken. Quebec, Montreal and Ottawa had indeed made themselves pleasant to her; she had enjoyed them all. But it was in the wilderness that the spell had come upon her; in these vast spaces, some day to be the home of a new race; in these lakes, the playground of the Canada of the future; in these fur stations and scattered log cabins; above all in the great railway linking east and west, that she and her brother had come out to see.
For they had a peculiar relation to it. Their father had been one of its earliest and largest shareholders, might indeed be reckoned among its founders. He had been one, also, of a small group of very rich men who had stood by the line in one of the many crises of its early history, when there was often not enough money in the coffers of the company to pay the weekly wages of the navvies working on the great iron road. He was dead now, and his property in the line had been divided among his children. But his name and services were not forgotten at Montreal, and when his son and widowed daughter let it be known that they desired to cross from Quebec to Vancouver, and inquired what the cost of a private car might be for the journey, the authorities at Montreal insisted on placing one of the official cars at their disposal. So that they were now travelling as the guests of the C.P.R.; and the good will of one of the most powerful of modern corporations went with them.
They had left Toronto, on a May evening, when the orchards ran, one flush of white and pink, from the great lake to the gorge of Niagara, and all along the line northwards the white