He studied the group. The men looked dull and beaten; the women had no
beauty and had grown coarse with toil. Their faces were pinched and
their shoulders bent. Only the children, in spite of rags and dirt,
struck a hopeful note. Yet the forlorn strangers had pluck; they had
made a great adventure and might get their reward. Lister had seen
others in the West, who had made good, breaking soil they owned and
walking with the confident step of self-respecting men. On the plains,
stubborn labor was rewarded, but one needed pluck to leave all one knew
and break custom's familiar but heavy yoke.

By and by Lister remembered he wanted to take his relations a few
typically Canadian presents. He had seen nothing that satisfied him at
Winnipeg, and had better look about the shops at Montreal. Anyhow, it
would amuse him for an hour or two. He got up, went along the path for a
few yards, and then stopped.

Across the clanging of the locomotive bells and the roll of trolley cars
at the bottom of the hill he heard sweet voices. The music was faint and
somehow ethereal, as if it fell from a height. One lost it now and then.
It came from the cathedral and Lister stopped and listened. He did not
know what office was being sung, but the jaded emigrants knew, for a
child got up and stood with bent head, holding a greasy cap, and a
ragged woman's face got gentle as she signed herself with the cross. It
looked as if the birds of passage had found a landmark in a foreign
land. Lister was moved, and gave the child a coin before he went off.

He strolled east, past Notre Dame, towards the post office, about which
the stately banks and imposing office blocks stand. This quarter of the
city drew him, for one saw how constructive talent and imagination could