If you are wise and wish to see the English aspect of Toronto, you will reserve your accommodations at a certain old hotel near the lakefront which is the most intensely British thing that will open to a stranger within the town. Within its dining-room the lion and the unicorn still support the crown, and the old ladies who are ushered to their seats wear white caps and gently pat their flowing black skirts. The accents of the employés are wonderfully British, and if you ask for pens you will surely get "nibs." The old house has an air, which the English would spell "demeanour," and incidentally it has a wonderful faculty of hospitality. From it you will drive out to the track, and if you elect you can find seats upon a tally-ho, drawn by four or six horses, properly prancing, just as they prance in old sporting-prints. Of course, there are ungainly motor-cars, like those in which the country folk explore Broadway, New York, but you will surely cling to the tally-ho. And if your tally-ho be halted in the long and dusty procession to the track to let a coach go flying by, if that coach be gay in gilt and color, white-horsed, postilioned, if rumor whispers loudly, "It's the Connaughts--the Governor-General, you know," you will forget for that moment your socialistic and republican ideas, and strain your old eyes for a single fleeting glimpse of bowing royalty. For royalty drives to Plate Day just as royalty drives to Ascot. Its box, its manners and its footmen are hardly less impressive. And in the train of royalty comes the best of Toronto, not the worst. Finely dressed women, jurists, doctors, bankers--the list is a long, long one. And in their train in turn the artisans. The plumber who tinkers with the pipes in your hotel in the morning has a dollar up on the "plate," so has the porter who handles your trunk, so have three-quarters of the trolley-car men of the town--and yet they are not gamblers. The "tout" who used to be a disagreeable and painfully evident feature of New York racing is missing. So are the professional gamblers, the betting being on the _pari-mutuel_ system. And the man who loses his dollar because he failed to pick the winning horse feels that he has lost it in a patriotic cause. It should be worth a miserable dollar to see royalty come to the races in a coach. * * * * * From Toronto we will go to her staunch French rival, Montreal. If we are in the midsummer season we may go upon a very comfortable steamer, down the lonely Ontario and through the beauties of the Thousand Islands. And at all seasons we will find the railroad ride from Toronto filled with interest, with glimpses of lake and river, with the character of the country gradually changing, the severe Protestant churches giving way to great tin-roofed Roman churches, holding their crosses on high and gathering around their gray-stone walls the houses of their little flocks. 21 WHERE FRENCH AND ENGLISH MEET