wn and write to
you of the mere joy of being alive? The news has killed the pleasure of
the day for me, and I am ashamed of myself. There are seventy brook
trout lying in a creel, fresh drawn from Harrison Hot Springs, and they
do not console me. They are like the stolen apples that clinch the fact
of a bad boy's playing truant. I would sell them all, with my heritage
in the woods and air and the delight of meeting new and strange people,
just to be back again in the old galling harness, the heat and the dust,
the gatherings in the evenings by the flooded tennis-courts, the ghastly
dull dinners at the Club when the very last woman has been packed off to
the hills and the four or five surviving men ask the doctor the symptoms
of incubating smallpox. I should be troubled in body, but at peace in
the soul. O excellent and toil-worn public of mine--men of the
brotherhood, griffins new joined from the February troopers, and
gentlemen waiting for your off-reckonings--take care of yourselves and
keep well! It hurts so when any die. There are so few of Us, and we know
one another too intimately.

* * * * *

Vancouver three years ago was swept off by fire in sixteen minutes, and
only one house was left standing. To-day it has a population of fourteen
thousand people, and builds its houses out of brick with dressed granite
fronts. But a great sleepiness lies on Vancouver as compared with an
American town: men don't fly up and down the streets telling lies, and
the spittoons in the delightfully comfortable hotel are unused; the
baths are free and their doors are unlocked. You do not have to dig up
the hotel clerk when you want to bathe, which shows the inferiority of
Vancouver. An American bade me notice the absence of bustle, and was
alarmed when in a loud and audible voice I thanked God for it. "Give me
granite--hewn granite and peace," quoth I, "and keep your deal boards
and bustle for yourselves."

The Canadian Pacific terminus is not a very gorgeous place as yet, but
you can be shot directly from the window of the train into the liner
that will take you in fourteen days from Vancouver to Yokohama. The
_Parthia_, of some five thousand tons, was at her berth when I came, and
the sight of the ex-Cunard on what seemed to be a little lake was
curious. Except for certain currents which are not much mentioned, but
which make the entrance rather unpleasant for sailing-boats, Vancouver
possesses an al