“But you are suffering for a drink,” said my new acquaintance eagerly. “You need it, eh? You feel already a kind of craving, eh what?”
“No,” I answered. “The fact is it’s rather early in the morning—”
“Quite so,” broke in the irascible gentleman, “but I understand that in Montreal all the saloons are open at seven, and even at that hour are crowded, sir, crowded.”
I shook my head.
“I think that has been exaggerated,” I said. “In fact, we always try to avoid crowding and jostling as far as possible. It is generally understood, as a matter of politeness, that the first place in the line is given to the clergy, the Board of Trade, and the heads of the universities.”
“Is it conceivable!” said the gentleman in grey. “One moment, please, till I make a note. ‘All clergy—I think you said all, did you not?—drunk at seven in the morning.’ Deplorable! But here we are at the Union Station—commodious, is it not? Justly admired, in fact, all over the known world. Observe,” he continued as we alighted from the train and made our way into the station, “the upstairs and the downstairs, connected by flights of stairs; quite unique and most convenient: if you don’t meet your friends downstairs all you have to do is to look upstairs. If they are not there, you simply come down again. But stop, you are going to walk up the street? I’ll go with you.”
At the outer door of the station—just as I had remembered it—stood a group of hotel bus-men and porters.
But how changed!
They were like men blasted by a great sorrow. One, with his back turned, was leaning against a post, his head buried on his arm.
“Prince George Hotel,” he groaned at intervals. “Prince George Hotel.”