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

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I should have been sorry, however, if I had not gone eastward at least as far as the Saguenay, and I am duly grateful to the American who, so to speak, irritated me into going there. He was a thin, pale youth, somewhat bald from clutching at his hair, who sat next to me at dinner my third day at Quebec. He announced to the table at large that he was travelling for his pleasure, but to judge from his strained face, travelling for his pleasure was one of the hardest jobs he had tried. He had been doing Quebec, and he gave all Canadians present to understand that Quebec had made him very very tired. Look at the trips around too. Look at the Montmorency Falls. Had anybody present seen Niagara? Well, if anybody had seen Niagara, the Montmorency Falls could only make him tired. One or two Canadians present bent lower to their food. But on the whole Canadians do not readily enter into argument, and half Niagara Falls is Canadian too, so that finding no opponents the youth proceeded triumphantly to give the relative proportions in figures of the two falls. As he directed them chiefly at me, I felt bound to say that I had seen falls about a tenth the size of either which had struck me as worth going to see. He then said that he guessed I was from England. I said this was so. Thereupon he told me that everybody in England was asleep. I suggested that sleep was better than insomnia, and shocked by my soporific levity, he advised me to go and have a look at New York if I wanted to know how things could hum. I said I supposed that New York was a fairly busy place. A silly remark—only he happened to be a New Yorker, and all that tiredness left him. I learnt so much about the busyness of New York that I have hardly forgotten it all yet.