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

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It was still raining when I recrossed to the steerage, and it was still raining when we got into the Canadian Pacific Railway dock at about 5 P.M. I was standing beside the horse-breaker at the time, and the first thing that caught his eye in Quebec was the shape of the telegraph poles.

'Why, look at them,' he said, 'they're all crooked!'

A little later, he commented on the slowness with which the French-Canadian porters were getting the baggage off the boat. 'They may have this here hustle on them that they talk of,' he said, 'but I've seen that done a lot quicker in London.'

It was more loyalty to the old country than disloyalty to the new that prompted the remark, in which there was perhaps some justification. A Canadian who was standing by seemed to think so at any rate.

'This is only French Canada,' he said, 'wait till you get West.'

Still we all of us had to wait a bit in French Canada anyhow. We did not get through the emigration sheds till 9.30 P.M., and then there was one's baggage to be got through the Customs after. Not that there was much in that, the officials being most amiable. But we none of us much enjoyed the emigrant inspection. It is necessary and desirable no doubt, but we felt that we had been inspected pretty often already on board the boat, and we had been up since daylight, and we were hungry and miserable, and hot in the sheds and cold out of them, and the babies fractious, and everybody shoving and pushing, and we felt like some sheep at sheep-dog trials which have to be driven through pen after pen, and would go so much faster if they only knew how, and the dogs didn't press them. However it was all accomplished at last, and then the emigrants got into the westbound train that was waiting for them. First and second-class passengers had long since vanished in carriages to such abodes of luxury as the Cháteau Frontenac and the rest of the leading hotels. Now there were no carriages left. And we heard that a hundred people at least had been turned away from the Château Frontenac, so full was it; and since in any case we wished to start our Canadian impressions from a humbler standpoint, we set out in the rain for a Quebec inn which some of the Canadians returning in the steerage had told us of. I suppose we had a good deal more than a mile to go through the rain carrying bags, along those awful roads from the docks. I know something about those roads, because I not only walked along them that night, but next morning I drove a dray along them. I had gone back to the docks to get my trunk which I had had to leave there, and the dray was the only thing I could get to drive up in. Soon after we had started I said to the driver—a merry-faced French Canadian—'Il trotte bien,' referring to the horse, and he was so pleased with the compliment, or the French perhaps, that he handed me the reins and let me drive the rest of the way through the stone piles and mud that appeared to form the roads in lower Quebec. In return for the reins I had lent him my tobacco pouch; and when the horse leapt an extra deep hole, he would stop filling his pipe and hold me in round the waist.