But it was high time to turn homewards. A faint light overspread the east; things began to take shape; houses, instead of appearing as dark blotches against the white, now looked like habitable dwellings; the separate boughs were distinguishable on the trees. As one neared the town signs of life were seen--and smelled; the pungent odour of the "coal-oil" with which the impatient and unthrifty housewife coaxed her wood fire more rapidly to catch, smote almost smartingly upon the nostril. Sleepy-eyed mechanics, buttoned to the throat, heavily "overshoed," and with hands bepocketed, strode sullenly workwards. Later on "cutters"--so are called the comfortable little one-horsed sleighs just seating a couple--sped hither and thither. Then a milk-cart or two glided past, the cans wrapped in furs, the hairs on the horses' muzzles showing white with cleaving ice. Later still, and when within the precincts of the town proper, children were met espying sleighs on which to get "rides" to school. It was a different world now. A dazzling sun transformed the dull dead landscape of the night into a blinding spangled sheet of purest white. Involuntarily the eyes half closed against that glare. No wonder the sub-Arctic eye lacks the large frank openness of those of softer realms; against even the summer sunshine the protection of approximated eyelids is needed, as the crow's-feet of the farmers' features prove. If Canada has earned the title of Our Lady of the Snows, she certainly equally deserves the title of Our Lady of the Sunshine; nowhere is sunshine so bright or so abundant; so bright and abundant that it is not unreasonable to suppose that it has not a little to do with the elimination of that "phlegm" from the descendants of the immigrant of that land to the folk of which the French attribute that characteristic. "There are few, if any, places in England," says the Director of the Meteorological Service of Canada, "that have a larger normal annual percentage [of bright sunshine] than thirty-six, and there are many as low as twenty-five; whereas in Canada most stations exceed forty, and some few have as high a percentage as forty-six."[12] "Weather permitting" is a phrase but rarely heard in Canada. But my early morning walk was over. It was one I would not have exchanged for many another taken under more genial skies. XIV The Mood for Walking § 19