ry small boys one dish and the
requisite number of spoons.) There was discrimination, there was choice,
in this matter of treating. A happy excitement accompanied it, which you
could read in the way Corydon clapped his soft felt hat on his head as
he pocketed the change. To be treated--to ten-cent dishes--three times
in the course of the day by the same young man gave matter for private
reflection and for public entertainment, expressed in the broad grins of
less reckless people. I speak of a soft felt hat, but it might be more
than that: it might be a dark green one, with a feather in it; and here
was distinction, for such a hat indicated that its owner belonged to the
Independent Order of Foresters, who Would leave their spring wheat for
forty miles round to meet in Elgin and march in procession, wearing
their hats, and dazzlingly scatter upon Main Street. They gave the day
its touch of imagination, those green cocked hats; they were lyrical
upon the highways; along the prosaic sidewalks by twos and threes they
sang together. It is no great thing, a hat of any quality; but a small
thing may ring dramatic on the right metal, and in the vivid idea of
Lorne Murchison and his sister Advena a Robin Hood walked in every
Independent Forester, especially in the procession. Which shows the
risks you run if you, a person of honest livelihood and solicited vote,
adopt any portion of a habit not familiar to you, and go marching about
with a banner and a band. Two children may be standing at the first
street corner, to whom your respectability and your property may at once
become illusion and your outlawry the delightful fact.

A cheap trip brought the Order of Green Hats to Elgin; and there were
cheap trips on this great day to persuade other persons to leave it. The
Grand Trunk had even then an idea of encouraging social combination for
change of scene, and it was quite a common thing for the operatives of
the Milburn Boiler Company to arrange to get themselves carried to the
lakeside or "the Falls" at half a dollar a head. The "hands" got it up
themselves and it was a question in Elgin whether one might sink one's
dignity and go as a hand for the sake of the fifty-cent opportunity,
a question usually decided in the negative. The social distinctions of
Elgin may not be easily appreciated by people accustomed to the rough
and ready standards of a world at the other end of the Grand Trunk; but
it will be clear at a glance that nobo