A CANADIAN SUNDAY.

Evening Post, Volume XLVII, Issue 82, 7 April 1894, Page 1 (Supplement)

A CANADIAN SUNDAY.

A country town of a Sunday afternoon in Canada is the quietest of existing things. Everything in it seems lifeless. Not a sound is heard from any side. One's own cough startles one in the very streets. Two cows slowly bend their way homewards; an over-iipe apple falls heavily in an unkempt front garden — even these signs of semi-life are a relief. Rows of youths, all dressed in sombre black, and all smoking cigars fearfully if not wonderfully made, lean against the walls of the inn at the corner, or stand in silent knots about the liorse - gnawed " hitcliiug-poßt." The jaded afternoou sunlight fulls slantingly and weariedly on untidy plots in which weeds strive for mastery successfully with flowers, on empty verandahs with blistered paint, on the dusly grass encroaching ever on tne street. I entered the inn. It is chilly, and in the common room which serves many purposes a battered stove lacking two-thirds of its mica radiates a dry and suffocating heat. On deal chairs, mostly tipped up, sit the youths but just now lounging without. They say nothing ; only they sit and smoke, and spit — how they spit ! They themselves probably are all unconscious of the incessant salivary sharpshooting ; but I — I — sit in terror, like a nervous woman dreading the pistol-shots on the stage. Soon church bells begiu to clang. No one heeds them, nor are they overiuviting; one is crooki-d, they are not in harmony, and they seem to be ringing a race in which the hindmost is to win. In the space of about an hour, however, the youths begin to move, as if with the feeling that at last will come a small relief from the awful ennui which they cannot express. When church is coming out, they go out and draw up before the doors. A heavy yellow light streams across the street, and with it issues an odour, perhaps of sanctity, but much pollut-d by kerosene. Greetings follow between the out coming damsels and the waiting youths, and ourious raucous laughs intended to be tender' are heard disappearing into darkened ways. Soon all is again hushed, and but for here and there the low and lugubrious Bounds of hymn tunes playod on old and middleaged organs, the little town might be a buried city of the East. — Arnold Haul tain, in Black wood's Magazine.