On sunny mornings we scorn the cabs and stroll across the Gardens. Sometimes we drop for a moment on one of the clumsily comfortable benches under the shade of the Canadian maples, and glance at the morning paper--a ponderous sheet much given to the news of Ottawa and London, discoursing upon the work of two Parliaments, but only granting grudging paragraphs to the news of a home-land, scarce sixty miles distant. That is British policy, the straining policy of trying to make a unified nation of lands separated from one another by broad seas. That England has done it so well is the marvel of strangers who enter her dominions. Montreal is loyal to her mother land, despite some local influences which we shall see in a moment. A surprising number of her citizens go back and forth to the little island that governs her, once or twice or three times a year. There are thousands of business men in the metropolis of Canada who know Pall Mall or Piccadilly far more intimately than either Wall street or Times square--and New York is but a night's ride from Montreal. So much can carefully directed sentiment accomplish. The paths that lead from the Gardens are varied and fascinating. One stretches up a broad and sober street to Ste. Catherine's, the great shopping promenade of the town, where the girls are all bound west toward the big shops that stretch from Phillips to Dominion squares--another at the opposite direction three blocks to the south and the harbor-front, a wonderful place now in a chaos of transformation that is going to make Montreal the most efficient port in the world. We can remember the water-front of the old town as it first confronted us a quarter of a century ago, after a long all-day trip down the rapids of the upper St. Lawrence--back of the gay shipping a long stretch of sober gray limestone buildings, accented by numerous domes, the joy of every British architect, the long straight front of Bonsecours market, the little spire of Bonsecours church, and the two great towers of Notre Dame rising above it all. There was a curving wall of stone along the quay street and it all seemed quite like the geography pictures of Liverpool, or was it Marseilles? [Illustration: A church parade in the streets of Montreal]