The menu for breakfast is always varied and long--and I speak not merely of the special trains we travelled in, for it was the same on ordinary passenger trains. One does not face a _table d'hote_ meal outside of which there is no alternative but starvation, but one is given the choice of a range of dishes for any of the three meals that equals the choice offered by the best hotels in London. Breakfast begins with fruit; breakfast is not breakfast in the American continent unless it begins with fruit. And at that precise time breakfast fruit was blueberries. Other fruit was on the menu: raspberries, melon, grape-fruit, canteloupe, orange-slices, orange juice, and so on; but to avoid blueberries was to be suspected of being eccentric, and even an alien enemy. Blueberries were in season. Blueberries and cream were being eaten at breakfast with something more than mere satisfaction by the entire Canadian nation. Blueberries were being consumed with a sort of patriotic fervour, for blueberries have a significance to the Canadian. It is a fruit peculiarly his own; he treats it as a sort of emblem, he waxes enthusiastic over it, and the stranger feels that if he does not eat it (with cream, or cooked as "Deep Blueberry Pie"), he has not justified his journey to the Dominion. Hint that it is merely the English bilberry or blaeberry, or whortleberry and--but no one dares hint that. The blueberry is in season. One eats it with cream, and it is worth eating. You may follow with what the Canadian calls "oats," but which you call porridge, or, being wiser since the dinner at St. John, you go straight on to halibut steak, or Gaspe salmon, or trout, or Jack Frost sausages, or just bacon and eggs. There is a range that would have pleased you in an hotel, but which fills you with wonder on a train. And not merely the range, but the prodigality of the portions, surprises. Your halibut or salmon or trout is not a strip that seems like a sample, it is a solid slice of exquisitely cooked fish that looks dangerously near a full pound, and all the portions are on the same scale, so that you soon come to recognize that, unless you ration yourself severely, you cannot possibly hope to survive against this Dominion of Food. When we sat down to that breakfast in the Canadian National diner I think we realized more emphatically than we had through the whole course of our reading how prodigal and rich a land Canada was. As we sat at our meal we could watch from the windows the unfolding of the streams and the innumerable lovely lakes, that expand suddenly out of the spruce forests that clad the rocky hills and the sharp valleys of Nova Scotia.