The ceremonial was in the green oblong, and all North Bay left their houses and shops to attend. The visit had more the air of a family party than aught else, for, after a mere pretence of keeping ranks, the people broke in upon the function, and Prince and Staff and people became inextricably mixed. When His Royal Highness took car to drive around the town, the crowd cut off the cars in the procession, and for half an hour North Bay was full of orderlies and committee-men automobiling about speculative streets in search of a missing Prince, plus one Mayor.
Sudbury, the same type of town, growing at a distracting pace because of its railway connection and its smelting plants, had the same sort of ceremony. From here we passed through a land of almost sinister bleakness. There were tracts livid and stark, entirely without vegetation, and with the livid white and naked surface cut into wild channels and gullies by rains that must have been as pitiless as the land. It was as though we had steamed out of a human land into the drear valleys of the moon, and one expected to catch glimpses of creatures as terrifying as any Mr. Wells has imagined. So cadaverous a realm could breed little else.
It was the country of nickel and copper. We saw occasionally the buildings and workings (scarce less grim than the land) through the agency of which came the grey slime that had rendered the country so bleak. They are particularly rich mines, and rank high among the nickel workings in the world. They were also, let it be said, of immense value to the Allies during the war.
Pushing south, the line soon redeems itself in the beauty of the lakes. It bends to skirt the shore of Lake Huron, a great blue sea, and yet but a link in the chain of great lakes that lead from Superior through it to Erie and Ontario lakes, and on to the St. Lawrence.
We arrived on a beautiful evening at Algoma, a spot as delightful as a Cornish village, on the beach of that inlet of Lake Huron called Georgian Bay. We walked in the astonishing quiet of the evening through the tiny place, and along the deep, sandy road that has not yet been won from the primitive forests, to where but a tiny fillet of beach stood between the spruce woods and the vast silence of the water. From that serene and quiet spot we looked through the still evening to the far and beautiful Islands.