Читать книгу Fruit Ranching in British Columbia - John Thomas Bealby - Страница 4
ОглавлениеLiverpool to Montreal.
It was about the middle of March when we landed at St. John, and the winter had been one of unexampled severity throughout Canada. The snow still lay deep all over the country as we journeyed towards Montreal. In fact, except for a few hours west of that city, where the snow had partly melted, exposing the bare earth in patches, unbroken snow extended all the way to the Rocky Mountains. Owing to this fact, we were unable to see very much of the real aspects and features of the country.
After a long and weary wait at St. John, in a cold and cheerless shed, draughty and of vast size, and after several false starts—in fact, owing to there being nobody to give us any information, we naturally assumed that every train which backed into the station alongside the shed was our train—we at length got away. After the superabundance of ready, if not disinterested, assistance which the railway traveller receives at an English railway station, we felt rather bewildered at the lack of porters to lend us a hand with our traps and chattels.
We were going out to settle in Canada. We were emigrants, or, as the Canadian Pacific Railway prefers to call them, colonists. Consequently, when we took train we travelled in a colonist car—"car" being Canadian for passenger carriage or coach. This vehicle has a platform at each end, and there is a short gangway, with a protecting rail on either side, which connects the platform at the rear end of one car with the platform at the front end of the next car. By this means you can walk from one end of the train to the other as it travels along. In the cars the seats are arranged two by two, facing one another, on either side of the central passage. At night the seats pull forward until they meet, and so make a bedstead, on which you can spread your rugs and wraps, and, though the bed is rather hard, you can generally contrive to get a fair night's rest. This arrangement provides, of course, room for only two out of the four passengers who occupy each compartment. The other two have to climb up on to a kind of broad shelf, which is pulled down from the roof of the car until it sticks out horizontally above the bed made by the two seats below.
The scene of subdued bustle which was presented at night, when everybody began to prepare for sleep, was only equalled, or rather it was excelled, by the buzzing of the same human hive just before breakfast time in the morning, when the factotum of each travelling party began to struggle in good humour for an opportunity to deposit his kettle or teapot on the stove.
The impressions we gathered during the course of our sixteen or seventeen hours' run from St. John to Montreal were necessarily fleeting. Everywhere there was snow—deep and dazzling white. Everywhere the prospect of the champaign was shut in by forests.
The villages came at fairly close intervals, and generally had an open, warm, and cheerful appearance. The houses were apparently all constructed of wood, and generally painted white. Their windows were flush with the wall, and along the front, and often along one or both sides as well, ran a stepped verandah. The verandah, we subsequently learned, is as invariable an adjunct of a Canadian house as the stoop is of the South African Boer's house. With their stacks of split logs for winter fuel, their air of quiet, easy-going prosperity, these villages and dwelling-houses gave a succession of gentle tugs at our heart strings, which were hanging loose and lacerated after their recent rupture from the soil in which they had been rooted from infancy.
At the outskirts of one or two of the little towns we observed cabs, mounted, not on wheels, but on runners: they were, in fact, sleigh-cabs. Sleighs proper were frequent on the landscape. Very curious to our unaccustomed eyes it was to see a black dot moving afar off across a level expanse of snow—a level expanse, framed round with a border of forest-trees, showing that it was a lake. After a while, as we drew nearer to the point for which the black dot was also making, we became aware that it was a sleigh. We could just see the horse's legs going trot-trot-trot, and just discern two figures in the sleigh, muffled up to the nose in furs. And to think they were thus driving iron-shod over the deep waters!
The thermometer ranged most of the time but very little above freezing-point; yet we did not feel unpleasantly cold. Certainly not in the railway cars, for they were rather too hot and close and stuffy; nor yet, again, when the train pulled up at some wayside station for the engine to take in water. On such occasions, all the passengers tumbled out like mice escaping from a corn-bin: it was such a delightful change to be able to stretch one's legs for a minute or two. And all the time the sun shone brightly; and somehow, when the sun does shine in Canada in winter, and especially when it shines on virgin-white snow, it glitters with a peculiarly brilliant lustre.
The most characteristic feature of the landscape east of the St. Lawrence and Montreal appeared to us to be these beautiful lakes, with park-like shores rising into low, gently-swelling hills and offering vistas of smooth lawns of unsullied whiteness. After we left Montreal, the country was flatter and more open. It was evidently of older settlement. Every now and again there was a house built of brick. This, together with fields and fences and roads, carried our minds back across the watery wastes of the Atlantic to a dear old country. Here, in this part of our journey, the snow was beginning to melt, and in several places we saw the cows and other cattle standing on patches of brown earth outside the byres, in which they had been shut up for so many weeks. There was not a scrap of anything for them to eat; but the fresh air would do them good, and, poor things, they looked spiritless and dejected enough, as they feebly whisked their tails in the cheering sun.
C.P.R. TRANSCONTINENTAL TRAIN.
