LEGENDS OF VANCOUVER

By E. Pauline Johnson
(Tekahionwake)




PREFACE


I have been asked to write a preface to these Legends of Vancouver,
which, in conjunction with the members of the Publication
Sub-committee--Mrs. Lefevre, Mr. L. W. Makovski and Mr. R. W.
Douglas--I have helped to put through the press. But scarcely any
prefatory remarks are necessary. This book may well stand on its
own merits. Still, it may be permissible to record one's glad
satisfaction that a poet has arisen to cast over the shoulders of
our grey mountains, our trail-threaded forests, our tide-swept
waters, and the streets and sky-scrapers of our hurrying city, a
gracious mantle of romance. Pauline Johnson has linked the vivid
present with the immemorial past. Vancouver takes on a new aspect
as we view it through her eyes. In the imaginative power that she
has brought to these semi-historical sagas, and in the liquid flow
of her rhythmical prose, she has shown herself to be a literary
worker of whom we may well be proud: she has made a most estimable
contribution to purely Canadian literature.

BERNARD McEVOY