TREE HERITAGE 



him outright. And when I was ten, I wanted to go to 

 Canada, and I, too, wanted to kill bears with spades. 



Later on, when I was twelve, I went to Dean Close 

 School, Cheltenham, and I remember a lecturer coming 

 to talk about Canada. I recalled little of v/hat he said, 

 but there was something he did that vividly impressed 

 itself on my mind. He was dressed in a tail coat with 

 stiff front, stiflf collar and white tie, and at one stage in 

 the lecture he caught hold of his collar and shook it 

 savagely and said, "Out in Canada we don't have to wear 

 these durned things, we can wear soft collars, or no 

 collars at all." At that age I had to wear a stiff collar, 

 which I strongly resented, and I wanted to go to some 

 country where I could wear a soft collar, or, better, no 

 collar at all. That was my second call to Canada. 



It was not until I was seventeen that the final appeal 

 to go there came to me, and the decision that I ul- 

 timately made as the result of this has affected my 

 whole life's work. An old time pioneer, Bishop Lloyd, 

 returned from the Western Prairies. He said he wanted 

 men who would go out there and throw in their lives 

 with the lives of the Canadians and build a little bit of 

 the old country over the seas. He said Canada wanted 

 men who would go ahead of the railway and blaze the 

 trail. 



As a youth of seventeen, that sounded fine to me. 

 There was something romantic about blazing the trail, 

 though at that time I knew little of what it really meant. 

 I went home and told my people that I wanted to go 



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