Читать книгу The Fair Dominion: A Record of Canadian Impressions онлайн

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Though we had not seen Canada, yet we had received a favourable impression of it, which was lucky, because the next day, when we had got into the St. Lawrence, it came on to sleet and vapour. We of the steerage, who had brought up our boxes and babies almost before breakfast, so as to be ready to land at the earliest moment, had to content ourselves with sitting on them between decks (on the boxes, for choice, but the babies would get in the way too), and watch the little white villages and tinned church spires and dark woods of French Canada drive past the portholes in the mist. We should like to have been on deck seeing more of our new home, breathing some of its bracing air; but the rain was incessant. Heavens, but it got stuffy too on that lower deck. Nine hundred of us in our best clothes and our overcoats—holding on to bundles and kids, and sweating. It got so stuffy, that I took the opportunity of crossing in the rain to the first-class, and hunting out two people to whom I had introductions. One was the Canadian Minister for Emigration, who had already been over to inspect us in a paternal sort of way and declared that we were 'a particularly good lot'—very different, he hinted, from the sort of English emigrants who used to be shipped over, and got Englishmen a bad name in the new country for years. His gratification at our general excellence was so natural that I did not broach the question of whether Canada's gain was England's loss. I hope it was not. I suppose we can afford to lose even good men, provided we are not going to lose them really, but only station them at a different spot along the great road of the Empire.