Westward with the Prince of Wales

by W. Douglas Newton

Yet, if Hamilton was industrial, it also knew how to meet a Prince. Its streets were delightfully decorated, and in the general scheme of bunting the authorities had hung over the roads in pairs, small square banners of the victory medal ribbon, so that the Prince passed under this sign of triumph always. Swaying high up in the trees, just coming into the autumn gold of foliage, this scheme of decoration made a most effective showing.

Part of the Prince's ride through the town was along James Street, that sweeps in a single straight line from The Mountain to the shore of the lake. All manner of citizens were crowded in this sumptuous boulevard and in the pretty streets that ran through the pleasant home centres. Now the cars passed through packed ranks of children ranged according to schools, and all torn between the purely human desire of shouting their heads off and the duty of singing, "God bless the Prince of Wales," the result being an eerie noise that left no doubt about the quality of the enthusiasm. When there were no children there were grown-ups, gathered everywhere, perched everywhere and anywhere in their determination to get a good view. On one low bungalow was a family group, mother, father, children and baby-in-arms, sitting perilous but serenely content on the very ridge-pole of the roof. From a group of houses in the same suave street had come many men, matrons and maidens, waving the green flag of the harp, all fiercely insistent on the rights of Ireland to cheer and show enthusiasm.

So the Prince came to a great, comely semi-Gothic hall with a million children round it (that was the effect, though Hamilton hasn't half a million inhabitants), and I don't know how many in it. This hall was a chamber of children, a forcing-house of delightful infants. Under the broad, mellow light that beat down from the great windows in the roof all the prettiest kiddies in the world seemed to be set in banks of cultivation. Children were in mass round the walls. Children stretched upward in a square of galleries. Children flowered everywhere—only a fillet of walking-space was clear, where a desperate gardener had clipped a passage-way for the Prince, it seemed.

And they were such vivacious children. They cheered. They sang lilting part-songs, each great bank of infancy taking up the melody until the hall was all tune, and the walls seemed to be pressed back by the fine soaring sweetness of the fugue. And when they had sung they burst into the sudden and amazing sparkle of their school yell, "Hamilton! Hamilton! Hamilton!" and then diffused their fervour in a swinging burst of cheers.

And Canadians, children or adults, can cheer. Hands and flags and hats and body join in, to give an impression both passionate and irresistible. And before this storm the Prince could only laugh and wave back with something of the children's abandon, and so delighted did he seem that one of the Canadians who watched him had every right to cry out:

"Say—say—isn't he just tickled to death?"

Through the streets in his ride to The Mountain this wave of cheering followed him, and, quick to respond, the Prince was once more on his feet in his car and waving gladly back to the crowds on the sidewalk. So ardently did he do this, that a little girl who had watched him coming and who watched his passing, turned to her mother and cried:

"Poor hand."

It was certainly a strenuously used hand, but its endurance had limits, and, as he was forced to transfer the office of hand-shaking to the left, so he frequently had to use the left for waving on these long rides, and give the right a rest.

On The Mountain, the tall buttress that curves behind the town, the Prince drove through avenues of fine homes to the Hamilton Memorial Hospital, a magnificent tribute to those men of the city who gave their lives in the war. It is, of course, thoroughly up-to-date in appointments, but it is more than that: it is a poignant link with the brave dead, for every ward has been dedicated to a brave son of Hamilton who died overseas, and a brass plate in each ward records the heroic name.