"It was just as if you saw me in an automobile and came along to tell me something," said the man who told me the story. "There was no king-stuff about it. And that's why he gets us. There isn't a sheet of ice between us and him." Another man said to me: "If you'd told me a month ago that anybody was going to get this sort of a reception I should have smiled and called you an innocent. I would have told you the Canadians aren't built that way. We're a hard-bitten, independent, irreverent breed. We don't go about shouting over anybody.... But now we've gone wild over him. And I can't understand it. He's our sort. He has no side. We like to treat men as men, and that's the way he meets us." III The long week-end, so strenuously begun, did, however, give the Prince his opportunity for rest and recreation. He had a quiet time in the home of the Governor-General at the beautiful Rideau Hall, the attractive and spacious grounds of which are part of the untrammelled expanses of the lovely Rockhill Park which hangs on a cliff and keeps company with the shining Ottawa river for miles to the east of the city. Apart from sightseeing, and golfing and dancing at the pretty County Club across the Ottawa on the Hull side, he attempted no program until Monday morning. Ottawa is not so virile in atmosphere as other of the Canadian cities. Its artificial heart, the Parliament area, seems to absorb most of its vitality. Its architecture is massed very effectively on the hill whose steep cliffs in a spray of shrubs, rise at the knee of the two rivers, the Ottawa and the Rideau, but outside the radius of the Parliament buildings and the few, fine, brisk, lively streets that serve them, the town fades disappointingly eastward, westward and northward into spiritless streets of residences. The shores of the river are its chiefest attraction. Below the Parliament bluff, there lies to the left a silver white spit in the blue of the stream, that humps itself into a green and habitual mass on which are a huddle of picturesque houses. These hide the spray of the Chaudiere Falls, which stretch between this island and the Hull side. Below the Falls is the picturesque mass of a lumber "boom," that stretches down the river. To the extreme right beyond the locks of Rideau Canal, is the dramatic lattice-work of a fine bridge, a bridge where railroad tracks, tram-roads, automobile and footways dive under and over each other at the entrances in order to find their different levels for crossing. Beyond the bridge, and close against it is the jutting cliff that makes the point of Major Hill Park. Between these two extremes, right and left, one faces a broad plain, wooded and gemmed with painted houses, and ending in a smoke-blue rampart of distant hills--all of it luminant with the curiously clarified light of Canada.