I can best describe myself as in a kind of trance in which past and present were merged into one, and in which there seemed to be no period when two wonderful, burning eyes had not been watching me in pity and amazement. As long as I lived I knew they would watch me still. In their light I got my life’s significance. In their light I saw myself as a boy again, with a boy’s vision of the future. The smell of lumber carried me back to our old summer home on the banks of the Ottawa, where I had had my dreams of what I should do when I was big. All boys being patriotic, they were dreams not merely of myself, but of my country. It worried me that it was not sufficiently on the great world map, that apart from its lakes and prairies and cataracts it had no wonders to show mankind. As we were a traveling family, I was accustomed to wonders in other countries, and easily annoyed when one set of cousins in New York and another in England took it for granted that we lived in an Ultima Thule of snow. I meant to show them the contrary. From the beginning my ardors and indignations translated themselves into stone. I had seen St. Peter’s in one country, St. Paul’s in another, and Chartres and châteaux in a third. I had seen New York transforming itself under my very eyes—the change began when I was in my teens—into a town of prodigious towers which in themselves were symbolical. Then I would go home to a red-gray city, marvelously placed between river and mountain, where any departure from its original French austerity was likely to be in the direction of the exuberant, the unchastened, the fantastic. All new buildings in Canada, as in most of the States, lacked “school.” “School” was, more or less in secret, the preoccupation of my youth—“school” with some such variation from traditional classic lines as would create or stimulate the indigenous. I had not yet learned what New York was to teach me later—that necessity was the mother of art, and that pure new styles were formed not by any one’s ingenuity or by the caprice of changing taste, but because human needs demanded them. Rejecting the art nouveau, which later made its permanent home in Germany, I combined all the lines in which great buildings had ever been designed, from the Doric to the Georgian, in the hope of evolving a type which the world would recognize as distinctively Canadian, and to which I should give my name. In imagination I built castles, cathedrals and theaters, homes, hotels and offices. They were in the style to be known as Melburyesque, and would draw students from all parts of the architectural earth to Montreal.