The reader will excuse my chronicling the Jubilee before telling about Grouard. I have no excuse other than caprice, nor any precedent other than the fact that Chinese authors write their stories backward. To resume then:
You will remember the medical doctor on the boat was telling me how, one day, Grouard would be a large city. I wish to go further and declare it one now in spite of its small population, that is if you will accept with me the definition laid down by an ancient Jewish writer who defined a large city as a place in which "there are ten leisure men; if less than so, lo! it is a village."
No one seems to be working unless it be the Indians who are training their horses for the sports that are to take place the day after to-morrow, which sports will last for a week. This might be the leisurely land of the hyperboreans where there is everlasting spring and the inhabitants never toil or grow old—
"A land in the sun-light deep
Where golden gardens glow,
Where the winds of the north, becalmed in sleep,
Their conch-shells never blow."
The first men we meet are the civil-engineers. Nearly every one surveys here, and even the wild geese run lines along the sky. These engineers are pleasant-spoken men of proper spirit, who have been hammered into hardihood by work and weather. Nearly all of them invite you to eat in their camps: "Come over to my stamping-grounds," says a youth who looks like a walking pine-tree. There is no doubt in the world he is lonely for his women-folk whom we happen to know "down home," for when we accept he smiles and says "Heaven bless you endlessly!" He gave us a good supper, too, of hot and savoury food, and the coffee, though served in cups of unbelievable thickness, was undeniably nectar.
Afterwards, we walk into the village to get acquainted with the people thereof, and to secure lodgings. Over the doors of some of the shops there are signboards written in Cree, that is to say in syllabic symbols which look like the footprints of a huge bird.
We are accosted by a gentleman of the Bible Society who wishes to sell us copies of the New Testament, which book, he says, is lightly esteemed in the North. He asks me if I belong to my Creator, but I dissemble in that I have never been able to say God created me without distinct reservations. There are certain ugly and reproachful traits in my make up which it seems sacrilegious to attribute to the Deity. This colporteur has a keen, clean mind—any one can see that—and I like him for his childlike straightness of soul.
He is carrying copies of the gospels in the different Indian languages, but, so far, has sold but few. Doubtless the Indians think with that Mendizabel, the Prime Minister of Spain, who once said to George Borrow, "My good sir, it is not Bibles we want but rather guns and gunpowder."
The knowledge one picks up on a walk down the street is varied in character and throws a light on village life several hundred miles from a railway.
There are three churches here, also a pool-room and a moving picture show. It costs fifty cents to see the latter.