town as the
Germans are to Europe.

The train for the valley, when on time, leaves Sicamous, on the main
line of the C.P.R., at about ten, good morning, but sometimes she waits
for the delayed eastern train. This happens very frequently on
Sundays--for who or what was ever on time on a Sunday? Sunday is the
lazy man's day--the lazy day of the world--the day on which we creep
along out of tune with things.

Now, when you get side-tracked at a C.P.R. station in the Rocky
Mountains waiting for a delayed eastern train, you may as well throw all
your plans into the lake, because they will be out of fashion when you
have an opportunity to use them again, and you will require new
ones--the train may come to-day and she may not come till to-morrow.
But, if that station chances to be Sicamous, and it is Sunday--and it
must be raining heavily, for when it is raining there are no
mosquitoes--you will not regret the delay, and you will be very much
interested if you have an eye for the unique, or if you have the
slightest inclination to be eccentric you will be reminded that--

There are friends we never meet;
There is love we never know.

Here people--strangers and friends--meet and nod, smile, talk and depart
ten or twelve times every day. You will wonder how people can talk so
much, and what they get to talk about--people who meet accidentally
here, only for a moment, and will never meet again, perhaps. Almost
hourly, night and day, cosmopolitan little throngs jump from trains,
chat a few moments among themselves, or with others who have been
waiting, and then allow themselves to be picked up by the next train and
rushed off into eternity--that is, so far as you are concerned, for you
will never see them again--and some of them were becoming so familiar.
They are voices and faces flitting across your past; they are always
new, always strange, always interesting; they are laughing, chatting,
smiling, scowling, worrying. There are fair faces and dark faces,
pleasant faces and angry faces, careless faces and anxious faces, and
faces that are thin, fat, long and short. The voices are as varied as
the faces. There is the sharp, clear voice and the dull voice, the
angry one and the pleasant one. There are young and old, beautiful and
ugly, scowls and smiles, the timid and the fearless--the black, the
white, and the yellow; and there are faces that look so much like ones
you know at home that you are just on the p