§ 17
This was in the spring. But I remember an autumn walk in Canada that was very different from this, both in the locality chosen and in the scenes viewed.
Late in October once, a friend and myself had three whole days' holiday!—rare and joyous boon! We took a train to the little Ontarian town of Stayner. From Stayner to the shores of the Georgian Bay was a little trudge of about three miles. But a trudge it was; for the train had been late; our knapsacks were heavy; the sun had set; and both darkness and hunger came on apace. But at last the shore was reached. And what a shore it was! For, beating on it from far away to the north was a wealth of waters—oceanic in magnitude, sombre as the sea and, as the sea, mysterious.
As we walked, the night closed in, the northern night, so beautiful, so clear, so immense. But it was chill and dark, and either we must advance, or we must seek shelter where we were. Shall it be a leafy "lean-to" under a pine, constructed of heaped-up boughs, or shall it be a trudge to a civilised hostelry? Such were the problems discussed over sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs (washed down with sandy water from the bay), as we sat on a wave-washed log, the wind blowing strong in our faces. The ground was damp as damp; the pines seemed lugubriously incompetent to shelter from the growing gale. Blankets we had none; night was upon us.—We decided to walk.
On the left was this rolling Georgian ocean, seemingly illimitable. In its northern stretches it reached up to Hudson's Bay, to the Arctic; and by its southern streams it drave down to Lake Ontario, to the St Lawrence, to the Atlantic. It was one with this Atlantic; it was one with the Pacific; it was first cousin to the Indian Ocean, and but once or twice removed from all the waters of the world, since they and it had a common origin.
The walking was superb. The sand was firm as asphalt: on the right was dimly visible a friendly fringe of trees—pine and scrub and brushwood; on the left there was ever that never-ceasing roll of waves—waves once more linking me with Ostend and Hove, Rotterdam and Rangoon, St John in New Brunswick, Ascension Isle, the Cape of Good Hope, and the palm-fringed coast of Malabar.
We walked. And we walked fast. But not too fast to notice. There was no moon. The stars came out, and in that pellucid northern air, where was no dust of road nor smoke of chimney, those stars shone as assuredly never can they shine elsewhere. It is a literal fact that, in order to determine whether or not the great luminous patches which I gazed at overhead were the veritable Milky Way or only drifting clouds lit up by starlight, I had to look again and again, and to take note as to whether there was perceptible any change of shape. There was not. It was the Galaxy itself; but so revealed, so clearly seen, so unremote, as it were, that once again the great portals of the Infinite seemed to open, and to permit a glimpse into the mysterious abode of Being—inadequate term by which we feebly connote the supreme unity of all that is. To permit a glimpse, too, into that puzzle of puzzles, the not impossible identification or unification or intussusception of that All with the smallest of its integral contents. For was not that assemblage of suns—those masses of solar systems, so numerous as to seem but a mist—was it not actually depicted on the tiny retina of the eye? It was; and, through this depicture, it was, as it were, intellectually embraced in the thinking mind behind; a fact symbolical of the truth, as yet but dimly comprehended, that in very deed the infinitesimal unit and the mighty All are one and identical.
However, ontological speculations under an autumnal sky have their limit; and glad indeed were we, after long search among the pines and the hemlocks, to find, albeit it was late, a hostel in which were warmth and shelter for the night.