I was at Hamilton, a city of between seventy and eighty thousand inhabitants, and situated amid delightful scenery at the western end of Lake Ontario. With its hills and magnificent views, Hamilton suggests a small Edinburgh, and (because of its tree-planted avenues and public gardens) an Edinburgh built on Garden-City lines. The train had lately taken me through the orchards and vineyards of the Niagara Peninsula, and here, in the market-place of Hamilton, I found glowing produce from that region—tons of peaches (selling for a few cents the large basketful), and great consignments of apples, pears, plums, and other fruits, massed with pyramids of vegetables and glorious clusters of flowers, so that, in passing along the bustling avenues, I walked amid the most seductive perfumes. “This, then, is the Fruit City?” I suggested to the resident of Hamilton who accompanied me. “That is a new name,” he replied, “for the Birmingham of Canada.” At this I could not help laughing as I looked around at Hamilton, a city bathed in unpolluted sunshine and almost innocent of factory chimneys. “Birmingham,” I pointed out, “is a manufacturing centre.” “Exactly,” said my companion; and he went on to tell me of Hamilton’s four hundred large factories, which annually produce I don’t know how many million dollars’ worth of cotton goods, farm implements, boots, furniture, and goodness knows what. Still was I mystified when dinner-bells rang in the part of the city whither we had wandered, and from out great buildings there poured swarms of high-spirited toilers, who mounted their thousands of bicycles and swept hungrily over the hill. I began to understand. The machinery in those factories was worked by the water plunging down the Niagara escarpment, over forty miles away. This was a sunny, white-coal Birmingham. I prefer it to the smoky, black-coal Birmingham. When I first crossed the Atlantic, some nine years ago, the Americans were deriving light and power from Niagara, but the Canadians had merely begun preparations to that end, preparations which, by the way, provided a touch of romance. For a temporary breakwater had been constructed some distance above the Falls, thus laying bare a strip of the river bed, and on that area of polished rock, which during countless ages had been swept by a terrific force, little toddling children were engaged in innocent frolics. Driving last year amid smiling homesteads, I saw the great steel cable which, suspended from a succession of lofty metal towers, transmits the power of the falls to municipalities of Western Ontario, a share even going to Toronto, which is more than eighty miles from the famous cataract.