Westward with the Prince of WalesNewton, W. Douglas (Wilfrid Douglas)
History
Westward with the Prince of Wales
Newton, W. Douglas (Wilfrid Douglas)
Canada -- Description and travel; Windsor, Edward, Duke of, 1894-1972
The seminaries had their flocks of black fledglings drawn up under the
professor-priests, and the sober black of these embryo priests had not
the slightest restriction on their enthusiasm.
There were crowds everywhere on that extraordinary ride, but it was in
Montreal itself that the throngs reached immense proportions. From the
first moment of arrival, when the Prince in mufti rode out from under
the clangour of "God Bless the Prince of Wales" played on the bells of
St. George's Church, that hob-nobs with the station, crowds were thick
about the route. As he swung from Dominion Square (in which the
station stands) into the Regent Street of Montreal, St. Catherine
Street, crowds of employes crowded the windows of the big and fine
stores, and added their welcome to the mass on the sidewalks.
Short notice had curtailed decoration, but the enthusiastic employes
(mainly feminine) of one tall store strove to rectify the lack by
arming themselves with flags and stationing themselves at every window.
Balancing perilously, they waited until the Prince came level, and then
set the whole face of the tall building fluttering with Union Jacks.
From these streets, impressive in their sense of vigour and industry,
the procession of cars mounted through the residential quarter to Mount
Royal Park. Here in the presence of a big crowd that surrounded him
and got to close quarters at once, the Prince alighted and stayed a few
minutes at the statue of Georges Etienne Cartier, the father of
Canadian unity, whose centenary was then being celebrated, since the
war forbade rejoicing on the real anniversary in 1914.
Cartier's daughter, Hortense Cartier, was present at this little
ceremony, and she was, as it were, a personal link between her father
and the Prince, who is himself helping to inaugurate a new phase of
unity, that of the Empire.
From this point the Prince's route struck out into the country
districts that I have described, but the crowds had accumulated rather
than diminished when he returned to the streets of the city, about one
o'clock, and he drove through lanes of people so dense that at times
the pace of his car was retarded to a walk.
The crowd was a suggestive one. All ranks and conditions were in
it--and conditions rather than ranks were apparent in the dock-side
area, which is a dingy one for Canada. But in all the crowds the thing
that struck me most was their proportion of children. Montreal seemed
a veritable hive of children. There were thousands and thousands of
them.
The streets were bursting with kiddies. And not merely were there
multitudes of girls and boys of that thoroughly vociferous age of
somewhere under twelve, but there were ranked battalions of boys and
maids, all of an age obviously under twenty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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