friend of a big anchor that had got stuck fast there on its way to the
Georgian Bay in 1812. "I bet you the sailors wouldn't have left it
behind if it had been an anchor of Hollands," said Coristine, whereupon
Wilkinson remarked that his puns were intolerable. At Bradford the track
crossed the Holland River, hardly flowing between its flat, marshy banks
towards Lake Simcoe. "This," said the schoolmaster, "is early
Tennysonian scenery, a Canadian edition of the fens of Lincolnshire,"
but he regretted uttering the words when the lawyer agreed with him that
it was an of-fens-ive looking scene. But Lake Simcoe began to show up in
the distance to the right, and soon the gentlemanly conductor took their
tickets. "Leefroy," shouted the brakesman. They gathered up their
knapsacks, dropped off the smoker, and sped inside the station, out of
the windows of which they peered cautiously to see that no attempt at a
pursuit was made by the ladies and their military protector. The train
sped on its way northward, and feeling that, for a time, they were safe,
the pedestrians faced each other with a deep-drawn sigh of relief. The
station-master told them to walk back along the track till they met the
old side-line that used to go to Belle Ewart. So they helped each other
to strap on their knapsacks, and virtually began their pedestrian tour.
The station-master would have liked to detain them for explanations, but
they were unwilling to expose themselves to further misunderstanding.
Walking on a railway track is never very pleasant exercise, but this
old Belle Ewart track was an abomination of sand and broken rails and
irregular sleepers. Coristine tried to step in time over the rotting
cedar and hemlock ties, but, at the seventh step, stumbled and slid down
the gravel bank of the road-bed. "Where did the seven sleepers do their
sleeping, Wilks?" he enquired. "At Ephesus," was the curt reply. "Well,
if they didn't efface us both, they nearly did for one of us."
"Coristine, if you are going to talk in that childlish way, we had
better take opposite ends of the track; there are limits, sir."