In a big stand there were massed several thousand school children, all of them in white, all of them carrying small flags, all of them thoroughly wet, and all of them enthusiastic beyond discipline.
They had carried the first outburst of cheering well beyond the capacity of mere adult lungs and endurance, and as they cheered without break, they waved their flags, so that the whole stand seemed a big fire, over which a multitude of tiny red, white and blue flames unceasingly played. This mass flag-wagging is a great feature of Western welcomes, and a most effective one. It enables the hands to join in an enthusiasm which the Canadian does not seem to be sufficiently able to express by his cheering and whistling. Really ardent Canadians put a rattle into their empty left hands, and express their joy of welcome with the maximum of noise as well as activity.
Only on the approach of His Royal Highness did these delightful children staunch their cheering, and that merely because they wanted their lungs to sing.
They transferred their enthusiasm into their songs. Their sharp, high singing, with a touch of the nasal in it, and a Canadian accenting of "r's," introduced us to the splendid and inevitable hymns—beginning with "O Canada" and ending with "God Bless the Prince of Wales"—that we were to hear across the breadth of the Dominion and back again.
On the stage below this great flower-box of infants was a number of girls; each of them, it seemed, a princess of her race, having the wonderful poise, the fine skin, and the bright comeliness that make Canadian women so individual in their beauty.
These girls wore bright, symbolical dresses, and each carried a shield bearing the arms and the name of the province of the Dominion of Canada she represented. It was a pageant of greeting in which, advancing in pairs, all the provinces the Prince was to visit in the next few months came forward to bid him welcome at the moment he set foot in the Dominion.
Curtsying to the Prince, the girls fell back and formed a most attractive tableau. It was a delightful picture, delightfully carried out, and there was no doubt about the Prince's pleasure.
While His Royal Highness witnessed this spectacle and listened to the singing of the kiddies, the crowd, vanquishing police and boy scouts and khaki, flooded over the open space and gathered about him. It was a scene we were to see repeated almost daily during the trip.
Without police protection, and, what is more, without needing it, the Prince stood in the centre of a homely crowd, rubbing shoulders with it, becoming an almost indistinguishable part of it, save for the fact that its various members found it an opportunity to shake hands with him.
It was a state of things a trifle strange to Britons. It would probably have seemed little less than anarchy to a chief of British police, yet one was immensely impressed by it. It had all the intimacy of a gathering of friends. And the Prince was as natural a part of that genial and informal crowd as any Canadian.