Now and then a lady of Elgin stopped to gossip
with another; the countrywomen looked on, curious, grim,
and a little contemptuous of so much demonstration and
so many words. Life on an Elgin market day was a serious
presentment even when the sun shone, and at times when
it rained or snowed the aesthetic seemed a wholly
unjustifiable point of view. It was not misery, it was
even a difficult kind of prosperity, but the margin was
small and the struggle plain. Plain, too, it was that
here was no enterprise of yesterday, no fresh broken
ground of dramatic promise, but a narrow inheritance of
the opportunity to live which generations had grasped
before. There were bones in the village graveyards of
Fox County to father all these sharp features; Elgin
market square, indeed, was the biography of Fox County
and, in little, the history of the whole Province. The
heart of it was there, the enduring heart of the new
country already old in acquiescence. It was the deep root
of the race in the land, twisted and unlovely, but holding
the promise of all. Something like that Lorne Murchison
felt about it as he stood for a moment in the passage I
have mentioned and looked across the road. The spectacle
never failed to cheer him; he was uniformly in gayer
spirits, better satisfied with life and more consciously
equal to what he had to do, on days when the square was
full than on days when it was empty.
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