From Banff in the afternoon of Thursday, September 18th, the train carried the Prince through scenery that seemed to accumulate beauty as he travelled to another eyrie of loveliness, Lake Louise.
At Lake Louise Station the railway is five thousand feet above the sea-level, but the Château and Lake are yet higher, and the Prince climbed to them by a motor railway that rises clinging to the mountain-side, until it twists into woods and mounts upward by the side of a blue-and-white stream dashing downward, with an occasional breather in a deep pool, over rocks.
The Château is poised high up in the world on the lip of a small and perfect lake of poignant blue, that fills the cup made by the meeting of a ring of massive heights. At the end of the lake, miles away, but, thanks to the queerness of mountain perspective, looking close enough to touch, rises the scarp of Mount Victoria, capped with a vast glacier that seemed to shine with curious inner lambency under the clear light of the grey day. There is a touch of the theatre in that view from the windows or the broad lawns of the Château, for the mountain and glacier is a huge back-drop seen behind wings made by the shoulders of other mountains, and all, rock and spruce woods, as well as the clear shining of the ice, are mirrored in the perfect lake that makes the floor of the valley.
Up on one of the shoulders of the lake, hidden away in a screen of trees, is the home of an English woman. She used to spend her days working in a shop in the West End of London until happy chance brought her to Lake Louise, and she opened a tea chalet high on that lonely crag. She has changed from the frowsty airs of her old life to a place where she can enjoy beauty, health and an income that allows her to fly off to California when the winter comes. The Prince went up to take tea in this chalet of romance and profit during his walk of exercise.
There is another kind of romance in the woods about the Château, and one of the policemen who guarded the Prince made its acquaintance during the night. In the dark he heard the noise of some one moving amid the trees that come down to the edge of the hotel grounds. He thought that some unpleasant intruder on the Prince's privacy was attempting to sneak in by the back way. He marched up to the edge of the wood and waited in his most legal attitude for the intruder--and a bear came out to meet him. Not only did it come out to meet him, but it reared up and waved its paws in a thoroughly militant manner. The policeman was a man from the industrial East, and not having been trained to the habits of bears, decided on a strategic withdrawal.