I believe the train at Sudbury was almost an hour late, which is why I have gone on so long noting trifles at large. When it did come in, somewhere about 8 A.M., we discovered that it was full up, and people had been standing in the first-class carriages all night. They had mostly breakfasted since, and the first-class carriage we got into was littered from end to end with bun-bags and sandwich-papers and orange peel, and all the refuse that results { 108} from picnics in trains. Tired parents and sleepy children were piled above this flotsam in an atmosphere hard to endure. Yet everybody was cheerful, and though we both wished in our hearts that we could have got 'sleepers' entitling us to Pullman accommodation, we were both grateful--or ought to have been grateful--that we were privileged to witness the contented spirit with which these representatives of the great Dominion bore their trials. Not a grumble--oh, my brother Englishman, not a grumble! Think of it.
I sat in the tail of the train smoking, while Ontario dropped behind, league after league of thin trees growing out of the rock, of rock growing out of bog or lake, of bog or lake covering all solid things. Sometimes the trees were green and dark; sometimes green and light; sometimes nothing but scorched trunks--black skeletons of trees left by a forest fire which had killed everything within reach like a beast of prey, but consumed only the tender parts.
Somebody, as we swung over a typical piece of muskeg country--black and juicy bogland covered with a foot maybe of clear water--began to tell a story of a train that had run off the rails and plunged head first into just such a place. It had been a long train, he said; a goods train, and it had gone down and down. When he saw it, the last truck only stuck out of the muskeg. We listened respectfully. It { 110} was at least a well-found story, illustrating the difficulties the engineers had had in laying the lines across a treacherous ooze that nothing seemed to fill or make firm.
What will become of this one-thousand-mile stretch of swamped rock-land? Nobody knows. There it lies separating East from West, as land impassable, unnavigable as water. Firs and minerals, these are the only things to be expected from it. Firs tend to grow less, but the minerals of course may in the end so count that no one will wish the country other than the rock it is. All along the line the railway authorities have up the names of stations, as though there really were stations there, and, even more, as though there were villages or towns which those stations served. You are carried past a hundred such stations--names on a board and nothing more at all, unless it be a solitary wooden shack in which some railway subordinate passes his life seeing that the line is clear. The gangs of workers, Galicians or Italians, who do repairs along the line, camp out; you see their camps now and then, temporary settlements in this No Man's Land.