With so much to tell of what befell me later, I have neither the time nor the inclination to detail the pleasures and the discomforts of a twelve days' trip by slow steamer across a storm-swept Atlantic, battened down for days on end, like cattle in the hold of a cross-channel tramp; of a six days' journey across prairie lands, in a railway car with its dreadful monotony of unupholstered wooden seats and sleeping boards, its stuffiness, its hourly disturbances in the night-time in the shape of noisy conductors demanding tickets, incoming and outgoing travellers and shrieking engines; its dollar meals in the dining car, which I envied but could not afford; its well-nigh unlightable cooking stoves and the canned beef and pork and beans with which I had to regale myself en route.
Jaded, travel-weary and grimy, I reached the end of my journey. It was late in the evening. I tumbled out of the train and into the first hotel bus that yawned for me, and not once did I look out of the window to see what kind of a city I had arrived at.
I came to myself at the entrance to a magnificent and palatial hotel; too much so, by far, I fancied, for my scantily-filled purse. But I was past the minding stage, and I knew I could always make a change on the morrow, if so be it a change were necessary.
And then I began to think,—what mattered it anyway? What were a few paltry sovereigns between one and poverty? Comforting thought,—a man could not have anything less than nothing.
I registered, ordered a bath, a shave, a haircut, a jolly good supper and a bed; and, oh! how I enjoyed them all! Surely this was the most wonderful city in the world, for never did bath, or shave, or supper, or bed feel so delicious as these did.
I swooned away at last from sheer pleasure.
The recuperative powers of youth are marvellously quick. I was up and out to view the city almost as soon as the sun was touching the snow-tipped tops of the magnificent mountain peaks which were miles away yet seemed to stand sentinels at the end of the street down which I walked. I was up and out long ere the sun had gilded the waters of the broad inlet which separated Vancouver from its baby sister to the north of it.
The prospect pleased me; there was freedom in the air, expanse, vastness, but,—it was still a city with a city's artifices and, consequently, not what I was seeking. I desired the natural life; not the roughness, the struggle, the matching of crafty wits, the throbbing blood and the straining sinews,—but the solitude, the quiet, the chance for thought and observation, the wilds, the woods and the sea.
As I returned to breakfast, I wondered if I should find them,—and where.
In the dining-room, during the course of my breakfast,—the first real breakfast I had partaken of in Canada,—my attention was diverted to a tall, well-groomed, muscular-looking man, who sat at a table nearby. He looked a considerable bit on the sunny side of fifty. He was clean shaven, his hair was black tinged with grey, and his eyes were keen and kindly.