The people on the great ocean liners leaving the Clyde, the Mersey, and the Severn for Canada cross the Atlantic to make homes across the seas. The object of all business and agriculture is home-making. If Canada was simply a country in which money was to be made under uncomfortable conditions, people would soon get tired of going to Canada. There are countries under the British flag and under the flags of other colonising Governments which are simply money-making countries. The climate is unhealthy or enervating, the conditions of life are such as are uncongenial to those who have been brought up in this great homeland of the world. It used to be thought that Canada was not the kind of country in which it would be possible to settle down to such home life as is the ambition of men in Old England, in Germany and France, and in the older cities of America. It was a legend that Canada for a great part of the year was a country under the dominion of unbearable cold—a country in which the thermometer went down to arctic depths, in which the icy atmosphere cut as with dagger stabs to the marrow of the bones, a country that was buried under fathomless depths of snow. Well, during three or four months of the winter—from the end of November to the middle of March—the greater part of Canada is decidedly cold. The thermometer _does_ sink to many degrees below zero, and the earth is hidden by a thick wintry white mantle. Canadians, however, laugh with huge enjoyment when they are asked whether they feel the cold—whether they ever keep warm in winter. They declare to a man and a woman that they never feel a quarter so cold in Canada as they do when they visit the Old Country, whether the visits are in an English winter or in a wet and cold summer. They resented Rudyard Kipling’s description of Canada as “Our Lady of the Snows.” This, they said, conveyed an entirely false impression of their country. As a matter of fact, they regard the winter as the most enjoyable season of the year. The virgin whiteness of the snow, the clear crisp air, the sunshine that floods the country week after week and month after month, the blueness of the sky, make it joy to be alive. The most pessimistic of curmudgeons feels happy and hopeful during the Canadian winter. His blood circulates briskly, his lungs drink in air of such purity that he feels almost as if he were walking on air with light and springy step. I met many Canadians who told of having experienced temperatures as low as 40 deg. F. below zero, and yet, they said, they kept warm and never experienced that marrow-chilling feeling that they get during an English December or March or even during an English summer, with its leaden skies, with a temperature somewhere in the 40’s or early 50’s, and the gusts of wind that search out every weak place in the body. The air is dry and still, and with these conditions it does not matter how low the thermometer may sink.