Westward with the Prince of Wales

by W. Douglas Newton

The crowd shared his amusement at the strenuous work of the camera men, who wormed their way through the masses of people with their terrible earnestness, dogged his steps whenever he ventured to move a yard, and who seemed to feel that the reason he stopped to make speeches was that they should be able to get a steady, three-quarter face snap of him at a distance of two feet.

When the Prince slyly hinted to a photographer that, really, the most important and newsy part of the function was the massed battalion of camera men, and that actually they were the people who should be photographed and not him, the crowd shared the joke with him.

Prince and people were all part of one democracy, the real democracy that never thinks about democracy, but simply acts humanly and naturally in human and natural affairs.

"He'll do," said one man. "Why—he's just a Canadian after all."

IV

The city had made itself attractive for the coming of the Prince. In the fine and broad King Street up which he drove to fulfil the many functions of the day, the handsome commercial buildings were bright with flags and hung with the spruce branches that individualize Canadian decorations. Turreted arches of spruce, and banners of welcome strung right across the street, entered into the scheme.

King Street is a brave avenue sweeping up hill from the very edge of the harbour water. Here the Market Slip, the old landing-place of the Loyalists, thrusts into the very heart of the city and brings the shipping to the front doors of the houses. In the big triangular space about it gather the carters with their "slovens," curious square carts, hung so low that their floor boards are but a few inches from the ground.

In King Street one can see the life and novelty of the town. In it are the hotels, in the vast windows of which people, involved in the ritual of chewing gum, sit as though on a verandah, and contemplate the passing world—it is a solemn moment, that first encounter through plate glass, of a row of Buddhas, with gently-moving jaws. Although most Canadian cities boast big hotels of modern type, the old type, with the big windows, are everywhere, to lend a peculiar individuality to the streets.

In King Street are the smart shops, showing jewellery, furs, millinery and the rest, of a design and quality equal to anything in London and New York. The Canadians have a particular passion for silver of good design, and the display in the shops is a thing that impresses.

Here, too, are the Boot-Shine Parlours, the Candy Stores, the temples of the Barbers, and those wondrous purveyors of universal trivia, the Drug Stores.