And not merely the range, but the prodigality of the portions, surprises. Your halibut or salmon or trout is not a strip that seems like a sample, it is a solid slice of exquisitely cooked fish that looks dangerously near a full pound, and all the portions are on the same scale, so that you soon come to recognize that, unless you ration yourself severely, you cannot possibly hope to survive against this Dominion of Food.
When we sat down to that breakfast in the Canadian National diner I think we realized more emphatically than we had through the whole course of our reading how prodigal and rich a land Canada was. As we sat at our meal we could watch from the windows the unfolding of the streams and the innumerable lovely lakes, that expand suddenly out of the spruce forests that clad the rocky hills and the sharp valleys of Nova Scotia.
We could see the homestead clearings, the rich land already under service and the cattle thereon. It was from those numberless pebbly rivers and lakes that this abundance in fish came; in the forests was game, caribou and moose and winged game. From the cleared land came the wheat and the other growing things that crowd the Canadian table, and the herds represented the meat, and the unstinted supply of cream and milk and butter. Even the half-cleared land, where tree stumps and bushes still held sway, there was the blueberry, growing with the joyous luxuriance of a useful weed.
To glance out of the window was to realize more than this, it was to realize that in spite of all this luxuriance the land was yet barely scratched. The homesteads are even now but isolated outposts in the undisciplined wilderness, and when we realized that this was but a section, and a small section at that, of a Dominion stretching thousands of miles between us and the Pacific, and how many thousand miles on the line North to South we could not compute, we began to get a glimmer of the immensity and potentiality of the land we had just entered.
There is nothing like a concrete demonstration to convince the mind, and I recognize it was that heroic breakfast undertaken while I contemplated the heroic land from whence it had come that brought home to me with a sense almost of shock an appreciation of Canada's greatness.
By the time I had arrived at Halifax, and had a Canadian National Railway lunch (for we remained on the train for the whole of our stay in the city) I knew I was to face immensities.