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The Dream of My Life

Gatineau Hills, Quebec

Thanksgiving Day, 1900

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness! Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun…” Bert Harper surveyed the autumn scene and quoted a few lines from Keats’s poem “To Autumn.” Just outside Ottawa, King Mountain was glorious in its autumn colours – fiery reds and oranges leaped into the blue sky. Below, the waters of King Lake winked merrily in the sunshine.

“Any regrets, old man?” Harper asked.

“Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find,” King continued the poem. “Regrets? On a day like this, seated in the bountiful lap of nature? But for the fact you are eating all the chicken! The cycling up here has made you as greedy as a lion.”

William Lyon Mackenzie King, M.P. (North Waterloo, Ontario) and Minister of Labour, December 1910. A Windsor suit still hangs smartly at Laurier House, Ottawa, Ontario.

Harper laughed, but this didn’t stop him from helping himself to another piece of chicken from the plate on the checkered picnic cloth. He lazily continued the conversation between mouthfuls. “You know what I mean, Rex. Europe, Harvard, all that! Any regrets about changing your mind and giving it up for a desk job in Ottawa?”

“A desk job in Ottawa?” King exclaimed. “I am King of the desks!” He leapt up on a boulder and took a mock strongman stance. “I am editor of the Labor Gazette – produced, I may add, with the worthy Mr. Henry Albert Harper, my friend, colleague, and roommate. I am deputy minister of labour, the youngest deputy minister in the history of Canada. I have seen the groundwork I laid built into the Fair Wages Resolution Act, striking down the use of sweat shop labour for government contracts. I am now truly carrying on the work of my grandfather, able to influence those who might do something for the working classes!”

“Hear, hear!” Harper encouraged, his brown eyes bright with glee.

“Why,” King said pridefully, “if my spirit and my resolve stay strong, I may even enter public life. I am but twenty-six. One day,” he paused, looking at the grand vista before him, “should it be the will of the God of Bethel, I may be premier of this country.”

Harper mumbled his approval through a mouthful of grapes.