he urged. "Canada is a one-horse place. There are far more chances across the line."
We kept secret our date of leaving, only Louis knowing it. On the morning of May 24th, the Queen's birthday, he came to fetch us and our luggage, the latter reduced to a minimum. There were no good-byes. But this excitable little Frenchman, who loved a touch of the picturesque, did not come quite as we expected. He arrived two hours before his time, with a wagonette and two prancing horses, his fat figure on the box, flicking his long whip and shouting up at our windows. His idea, he explained as we climbed in, was to avoid the main station, where we should be bound to see a dozen people we knew. He proposed, instead, to drive us twenty miles to a small station, where the train stopped on its way north. There was no time to argue. I sat beside him on the box with the precious fiddle, Kay got behind with our two bags, and Louis drove us and his spanking pair along King Street and then up Yonge Street. Scores recognized us, wondering what it meant, for these were the principal streets of the town, but Louis flourished his whip, gave the horses their head, and raced along the interminable Yonge Street till at length the houses disappeared, and the empty reaches of the hinterland took their place. He saw us into the train with our luggage and our few dollars, waving his whip in farewell as the engine started. We did not see him again till he arrived, thin, worried, anxious and gabbling, in the East 19th Street boarding-house the following autumn.
My Toronto episodes were over. I had been eighteen months in the country and was close upon twenty-two; my capital I had lost, but I had gained at least a little experience in exchange. I no longer trusted every one at sight. The green paint had worn thin in patches, if not all over. The collapse of the Dairy made me feel old, the Hub disaster made me a Methuselah. My home life seemed more and more remote, I had broken with it finally, I could never return to the old country, nor show my face in the family circle again. Thus I felt, at least. The
pain and unhappiness in me seemed incurably deep, and
