though some other cities in the Dominion do not quite understand this
immoral mood of Nature, men who have made their money in them go off to
Victoria, and with the zeal of converts preach and preserve its
beauties.

We went to look at a marine junk-store which had once been Esquimalt, a
station of the British Navy. It was reached through winding roads,
lovelier than English lanes, along watersides and parkways any one of
which would have made the fortune of a town.

'Most cities,' a man said, suddenly, 'lay out their roads at right
angles. We do in the business quarters. What d'you think?'

'I fancy some of those big cities will have to spend millions on curved
roads some day for the sake of a change,' I said. 'You've got what no
money can buy.'

'That's what the men tell us who come to live in Victoria. And they've
had experience.'

It is pleasant to think of the Western millionaire, hot from some
gridiron of rectangular civilisation, confirming good Victorians in the
policy of changing vistas and restful curves.

There is a view, when the morning mists peel off the harbour where the
steamers tie up, or the Houses of Parliament on one hand, and a huge
hotel on the other, which as an example of cunningly-fitted-in
water-fronts and facades is worth a very long journey. The hotel was
just being finished. The ladies' drawing-room, perhaps a hundred feet by
forty, carried an arched and superbly enriched plaster ceiling of knops
and arabesques and interlacings, which somehow seemed familiar.

'We saw a photo of it in _Country Life_,' the contractor explained. 'It
seemed just what the room needed, so one of our plasterers, a
Frenchman--that's him--took and copied it. It comes in all right,
doesn't it?'

About the time the noble original was put up in England Drake might have
been sailing somewhere off this very coast. So, you see, Victoria
lawfully holds the copyright.

I tried honestly to render something of the colour, the gaiety, and the
graciousness of the town and the island, but only found myself piling up
unbelievable adjectives, and so let it go with a hundred other wonders
and repented that I had wasted my time and yours on the anxious-eyed
gentlemen who talked of 'drawbacks.' A verse cut out of a newspaper
seems to sum up their attitude:

As the Land of Little Leisure
Is the place where things are done,
So the Land of Scanty Pleasure
Is the place for lots of fun.
In the Land of Plenty Tro