He may not have his habitant, his
seigneur or his cure down cold, but he makes me believe that he
has, and I can ask no more than that of him. In like manner, he
makes the ambient, physical as well as social, sensible around
me: the cold rivers, the hard, clear skies, the snowy woods and
fields, the little frozen villages of Canada. In this book,
which is historical of the present rather than the past, he gives
one a realizing sense of the Canadians, not only in the country
but in the city, at least so far as they affect each other
psychologically in society, and makes one feel their interesting
temperamental difference from Americans. His Montrealers are
still Englishmen in their strenuous individuality; but in the
frank expression of character, of eccentricity, Charley Steele is
like a type of lawyer in our West, of an epoch when people were
not yet content to witness ideals of themselves, but when they
wished to be their poetry rather than to read it. In his second
life he has the charm for the imagination that a disembodied
spirit might have, if it could be made known to us in the
circumstances of another world.
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