Page:Daughters of Genius.djvu/126

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118
THE PRINCESS LOUISE.

cherishes the sentiment of loyalty than the distant colonies.

We can observe this by just stepping across the border line between Canada and the United States. Recently, I spent a day or two at Calais, in Maine, which is separated from St. Stephens, in New Brunswick, by the river St. Croix, a stream so narrow that it is crossed by a covered wooden bridge. The two towns are not more than a hundred yards apart. People cross and recross as freely as they go from one street to another of their own town. Calais ladies who want a pair of kid gloves step over to New Brunswick and buy them; and St. Stephens ladies in quest of a patent nutmeg-grater cross to the United States and supply their want. Between the inhabitants of the two places there is the most perfect friendliness of feeling. They intermarry; they become partners in business; they go to one another's parties, lectures, concerts, churches; in short, they mingle in every way, and co-operate in everything—except one!

The exception is politics. Over Calais wave the stars and stripes; over St. Stephens "the meteor flag of England." At Calais—town meetings, republican rallies, democratic caucuses, the Maine Law, Fourth of July, and Hurrah for Blaine. At St. Stephens—our gracious queen, gossip of changes in the dominion ministry, and portraits of the Marquis of Lorne and the Princess Louise. It is like two people sitting side by side with their hands almost touching; but, near as those hands are, each draws its life blood from another heart, and its nervous force from another brain.

Some of the polite inhabitants of St. Stephens have a "Peerage upon their tables; while two-thirds of the people of Calais scarcely have an idea what a Peerage is. A little information, therefore, concerning the new Governor-General may not be unacceptable on our side of