Chapter 17

A CONCLUSION

Canada possesses two pillars of Strength and Beauty in Quebec and
Victoria. The former ranks by herself among those Mother-cities of whom
none can say 'This reminds me.' To realise Victoria you must take all
that the eye admires most in Bournemouth, Torquay, the Isle of Wight,
the Happy Valley at Hong-Kong, the Doon, Sorrento, and Camps Bay; add
reminiscences of the Thousand Islands, and arrange the whole round the
Bay of Naples, with some Himalayas for the background.

Real estate agents recommend it as a little piece of England--the island
on which it stands is about the size of Great Britain--but no England is
set in any such seas or so fully charged with the mystery of the larger
ocean beyond. The high, still twilights along the beaches are out of the
old East just under the curve of the world, and even in October the sun
rises warm from the first. Earth, sky, and water wait outside every
man's door to drag him out to play if he looks up from his work; and,
though some other cities in the Dominion do not quite understand this
immoral mood of Nature, men who have made their money in them go off to
Victoria, and with the zeal of converts preach and preserve its
beauties.

We went to look at a marine junk-store which had once been Esquimalt, a
station of the British Navy. It was reached through winding roads,
lovelier than English lanes, along watersides and parkways any one of
which would have made the fortune of a town.

'Most cities,' a man said, suddenly, 'lay out their roads at right
angles. We do in the business quarters. What d'you think?'

'I fancy some of those big cities will have to spend millions on curved
roads some day for the sake of a change,' I said. 'You've got what no
money can buy.'

'That's what the men tell us who come to live in Victoria. And they've
had experience.'

It is pleasant to think of the Western millionaire, hot from some
gridiron of rectangular civilisation, confirming good Victorians in the
policy of changing vistas and restful curves.

There is a view, when the morning mists peel off the harbour where the
steamers tie up, or the Houses of Parliament on one hand, and a huge
hotel on the other, which as an example of cunningly-fitted-in
water-fronts and facades is worth a very long journey. The hotel was
just being finished. The ladies' drawing-room, perhaps a hundred feet by
forty, carried an arched and superbly enriched plaster ceiling of knops
and arabesques and interlacings, which somehow seemed familiar.

'We saw a photo of it in _Country Life_,' the contractor explained. 'It
seemed just what the room needed, so one of our plasterers, a
Frenchman--that's him--took and copied it. It comes in all right,