During this rest, too, the Prince suffered a little from his eyes, an irritation caused by grains of steel that had blown into them while viewing the works at "Soo." His right hand was also painful from the heartiness of Toronto, and the knuckles swollen. To set these matters right, the doctor went up from the train, and by the Indian canoe that carried the mail and the daily news bulletin, reached the camp.
When he returned on Monday, September 8th, the Prince was looking undeniably fit. He marched up the railway from the lake in footer-shorts and golf jacket, with an air of one who had thoroughly enjoyed "roughing it."
While the Prince and his party were camping, the train remained in Nipigon, a tiny village set in complete isolation on the edge of the river and in the heart of the woods.
It is a little germ-culture of humanity cut off from the world. The only way out is, apparently, the railway, though, perhaps, one could get away by the boats that come up to load pulp wood, or by the petrol launches that scurry out on to Lake Superior and its waterside towns. But the roads out of it, there appear to be none. Follow any track, and it fades away gently into the primitive bush.
It is a nest of loneliness that has carried on after its old office as a big fur collecting post--you see the original offices of Revillon Frères and the Hudson Bay Company standing today--has gone. Now it lives on lumber and the fishing, and one wonders what else.
Its tiny station, through which the Transcontinental trains thunder, is faced by a long, straggling green, and fringing the green is a row of wooden shops and houses equally straggling. They have a somnolent and spiritless air. Behind is a wedge of pretty dwellings stretching down to the river, tailing off into an Indian encampment by the stream, where, about dingy tepees, a dozen or so stoic children play.
There are three hundred souls in the village, mainly Finns and Indians become Canadians. They are not the Indians of Fenimore Cooper, but men who wear peaked caps, bright blouse shirts or sweaters, with broad yellow, blue and white stripes (a popular article of wear all over Canada), and women who wear the shin skirts and silks of civilization. Only here and there one sees old squaw women, stout and brown and bent, with the plaid shawl of modernity making up for the moccasins of their ancient race.