beautiful and ugly, scowls and smiles, the timid and the fearless—­the black, the white, and the yellow; and there are faces that look so much like ones you know at home that you are just on the point of asking them how the boys and girls have been since you left.  If they had known that they were the actors on a stage, and you were the audience, conditions might have been improved—­artificially; they might have acted better, with more “class,” but the interest would have been injured; you would have been robbed of a genuine entertainment.  Those people went north, south, east and west; they went to the four corners of the earth.  The sound of their voices and laughs go up into the tree-tops, up into the hills and down into the lake, and they are echoed back to us; and that is the only record that is ever taken, of this interesting drama; and then the voices fade away east—­fade away west.

But you hear the elaborate puffing and snorting of a locomotive as though laboring under its great load of humanity; there is a loud whistle from somewhere, and then another; two engines are speaking to each other; then the bell rings, the engine sweeps by, and the whole earth trembles—­it is the delayed eastern train.  There is a great scramble for entrance.  Chance acquaintances are forgotten in the individual excitement.  The steps to one car are blocked by one man who has enough baggage for ten, and one worried-looking young lady with a baby is afraid she will lose her train.  The train pulls out with a “swish, swish” of escaping steam under great pressure from the engine, and the station is robbed of half its population.  The familiar faces have disappeared, but a new throng has been cast into your midst—­new faces, new smiles, new voices, new scowls; and the chatter is renewed with vigor when we have found ourselves, and are located in several little isolated bunches.  But the Okanagan local is here waiting for our scalps.  There is another scramble of men, women, children, bag and baggage, for seats, and we are off.  The little station platform is deserted and silent but for the clatter of the wheels of the baggage truck.  The tree tops sigh, the lake murmurs, but they cannot hold us, we must hurry to the great beyond—­the whole world depends upon our individual movements.

Of the Ubiquitous Cat

Once upon a time I had a very curious experience which had a very curious ending.

I walked into a strange person’s house, uninvited, for some mysterious reason perfectly unknown to myself.

Sitting promiscuously around an old-fashioned fire-place, in which blazed a cheery fire, were a man and woman and four small children; and on a lounge, partly hid under the eiderdown quilt, lay a pure white cat, half asleep and half awake, and at intervals casting sly glances at some of the children.  The cat seemed to all intent and purpose one of that human family.