CHAPTER X
MONTREAL: QUEBEC
I
Montreal was not actually in the schedule. In the program of the Prince's tour it was put down as the last place he should visit. This, in a sense, was fitting. It was proper that the greatest city in Canada should wind up the visit in a befitting week.
All the same, as the Prince himself said, he could not possibly start for the West without making at least a call on Montreal, so he rounded off his travels among the big cities of the Canadian East by spending the inside of a day there.
I wonder whether there was ever an inside of a day so crowded? I was present when Manchester rushed President Wilson through a headlong morning of events, and the Manchester effort was pedestrian beside Montreal's. Even the Prince, who himself can put any amount of vigour into life, must have found nothing in his experience to equal a non-stop series of ceremonies carried on, at times, at a pace of forty-miles an hour.
That is what happened. Montreal was given about four hours of the Prince. Montreal is a progressive city; it has an up-to-date and "Do-It-Now" sense. Confronted at very short notice with those four hours, it promptly set itself to make the most of them. It packed about four days' program into them.
It managed this, of course, by using motor-cars. The whole of the American Continent, I have come to see, has a motor-car method of thinking out and accomplishing things. Montreal certainly has. Montreal met the Prince in an automobile mood, whipped him from the train and entertained him on the top gear for every moment of his stay.