nly story connected with the Sunday stroll of the
Prince. Another, and perhaps a romantic version of the same one, was
that it was the Prince who made and lost the bet. He was said to have
come upon not boys but girls bathing. Seeing one of them poised
skirted and stockinged, for all the world as though she were the
authentic bathing girl on the cover of an American magazine, ready to
dive, he bet her a cool twenty that she dare not take her plunge from
the highest board.

This story may be true or it may be, well, Canadian. I mean by that it
may be one of the jolly stories that Canadians from the very beginning
began to weave about the personality of His Royal Highness. It is,
indeed, an indication of his popularity that he became the centre of a
host of yarns, true or apocryphal, that followed him and accumulated
until they became almost a saga by the time the tour was finished.

II

In this short stroll the Prince saw much of a town that is certainly
worth seeing.

Halifax on the first impact has a drab air that comes as a shock to
those who sail through the sharp, green hills of the Narrows and see
the hilly peninsula on which the town is built hanging graciously over
the sparkling blue waters of one of the finest and greatest harbours in
the world.

From the water the multi-coloured massing of the houses is broken up
and softened by the vividness of the parks and the green billowing of
the trees that line most of the streets. Landing, the newcomer is at
once steeped in the depressing air of a seaport town that has not
troubled to keep its houses in the brightest condition. As many of
those houses are of wood, the youthful sparkle of which vanishes in the
maturity of ill-kept paintwork, the first impression of Halifax is
actually more melancholy than it deserves to be.

The long drive through Water Street from the docks, moreover, merely
lands one into a business centre where the effect of many good
buildings is spoilt by the narrowness of the streets. Such a condition
of things is no doubt unavoidable in a town that is both commercial and
old, but those who only see this side of Halifax had better appreciate
the fact that the city is Canadian and new also, and that there are
residential districts that are as comely and as up-to-date as anywhere
in the Western Continent.

Halifax certainly blends history and business in a way to make it the
most English of towns. It is like nothing so much as a s