est ornaments of civilization, that in the virgin fields of the
possessions which the good swords of our ancestors wrung for us from
the Algonquins and the--and the other savages--may be hidden the most
glorious period of the British race."

Mr Hesketh paused and coughed. His audience neglected the opportunity
for applause, but he had their undivided attention. They were looking at
him and listening to him, these Canadian farmers, with curious interest
in his attitude, his appearance, his inflection, his whole personality
as it offered itself to them--it was a thing new and strange. Far out
in the Northwest, where the emigrant trains had been unloading all
the summer, Hesketh's would have been a voice from home; but here, in
long-settled Ontario, men had forgotten the sound of it, with many other
things. They listened in silence, weighing with folded arms, appraising
with chin in hand; they were slow, equitable men.

"If we in England," Hesketh proceeded, "required a lesson--as perhaps we
did--in the importance of the colonies, we had it; need I remind you? in
the course of the late protracted campaign in South Africa. Then did
the mother country indeed prove the loyalty and devotion of her colonial
sons. Then were envious nations compelled to see the spectacle of
Canadians and Australians rallying about the common flag, eager to
attest their affection for it with their life-blood, and to demonstrate
that they, too, were worthy to add deeds to British traditions and
victories to the British cause."

Still no mark of appreciation. Hesketh began to think them an unhandsome
lot. He stood bravely, however, by the note he had sounded. He dilated
on the pleasure and satisfaction it had been to the people of England
to receive this mark of attachment from far-away dominions and
dependencies, on the cementing of the bonds of brotherhood by the blood
of the fallen, on the impossibility that the mother country should ever
forget such voluntary sacrifices for her sake, when, unexpectedly and
irrelevantly, from the direction of the cloakroom, came the expressive
comment "Yah!"

Though brief, nothing could have been more to the purpose, and Hesketh
sacrificed several effective points to hurry to the quotation--

What should they know of England
Who only England know?

which he could not, perhaps, have been expected to forbear. His
audience, however, were plainly not in the vein for compliment. The same
voice from the an