Those who have always been accustomed to the magnificent distances of Canada frequently marvel at the small acquaintance many British people have with their native country. What may seem a phenomenal ignorance is oftener only a proof of an ancient fiscal limitation. In Thornliebank we knew about Loch Lomond, the Trossachs, and the glories of the more northern hills and glens. But to go to Loch Lomond, for instance, was a financial adventure, as well as a serious railway journey, to be followed by costly coaching along the shore. Ben Lomond, the three-thousand-feet mountain which stands like a sentinel over the twenty-two miles of islanded water, is forty miles from Glasgow--the distance of Hamilton from Toronto. Last summer we motored from Glasgow to the hotel at the foot of the mountain, and back again, in four hours. Besides the scenery so often mentioned but so seldom described, we saw the proofs of the disappearance of the former age, which, admirable as it is from the point of view of the popularization of what used to be the joy of a few, still seems rather flippantly to challenge the majesty of the prospect--I mean the abundance of travel by motor char-a-banc. Gasoline has indeed done wonders for travel; but a big bus, rolling along at twenty miles an hour, with as many passengers as the first steamer that plied on the Clyde--the “Comet” in 1812--is not the picturesque sight that a tally-ho, with horses four, and an echoing horn used to be. Naturally, an old railroader is all for better transportation, and the multiplication of fares; but, the old ways had their good features, and, somehow, one has a lingering feeling that it were better for the older-fashioned picturesqueness, which the multitude could not see, to remain than that everything in life should be subdued to gas--and perhaps, in time, to jazz. On the whole, the men who gave most of their time to the kirk also served the community most consistently in other spheres. Fifty and sixty years ago the larger duties of citizenship were not commonly open to men who worked for wages. My father was past fifty before the ten-pound householder had a Parliamentary vote. The teaching of men like Robert Owen, and the rise of trade unionism, synchronized with intellectual, social and economic advances among working people who didn’t cease to read when they left school. Mechanics’ Institutes abounded. Co-operative societies sprang up in almost every industrial community in the Lowlands of Scotland and the north of England. There was one in Thornliebank, of which William Hanna was the treasurer.