minded of the human race.

Circumstances made my personal knowledge of her all too slight. Our
spiritual intimacy, however, was very strong, and I hope I shall be
pardoned for saying a few words as to how our friendship began. It
was at the time of Vancouver's infancy, when the population of the
beautiful town of her final adoption was less than a twelfth of what
it now is, and less than a fiftieth part of what it is soon going
to be.

In 1906 I met her during one of her tours. How well I remember it!
She was visiting London in company with Mr. McRaye--making a tour of
England--reciting Canadian poetry. And on this occasion Mr. McRaye
added to the interest of the entertainment by rendering in a
perfectly marvellous way Dr. Drummond's Habitant poems. It was in
the Steinway Hall, and the audience was enthusiastic. When, after
the performance, my wife and I went into the room behind the
stage to congratulate her, I was quite affected by the warm and
affectionate greeting that I got from her. With moist eyes she
told her friends that she owed her literary success mainly to me.

And now what does the reader suppose that I had done to win all
these signs of gratitude? I had simply alluded--briefly alluded--in
the London "Athenaeum" some years before, to her genius and her
work. Never surely was a reviewer so royally overpaid. Her allusion
was to a certain article of mine on Canadian poetry which was
written in 1889, and which she had read so assiduously that she
might be said to know it by heart: she seemed to remember every
word of it.

Now that I shall never see her face again it is with real emotion
that I recur to this article and to the occasion of it. Many years
ago--nearly a quarter of a century--a beloved friend whom I still
mourn, Norman Maccoll, editor of the "Athenaeum," sent me a book
called "Songs of the Great Dominion," selected and edited by the
poet, William Douw Lighthall. Maccoll knew the deep interest I
have always taken in matters relating to Greater Britain, and
especially in everything relating to Canada. Even at that time
I ventured to prophesy that the great romance of the twentieth
century would be the growth of the mighty world-power of Canada,
just as the great romance of the nineteenth century had been the
inauguration of the nascent power that sprang up among Britain's
antipodes. He told me that a leading article for the journal upon
some weighty subject was wanted, and asked me whether the