The Imperialist

The South Fox fight was almost over. Three days only remained before the polling booths would be open, and the voters of the towns of Elgin and Clayfield and the surrounding tow...

“I understand how you must feel in the matter, Murchison, said Henry Cruickshank. “It’s the most natural thing in the world that you should want to clear yourself definitely, es...

Miss Milburn pressed her contention that the suspicion of his desire would be bad for her lover’s political prospects till she made him feel his honest passion almost a form of...

It would have been idle to inquire into the antecedents, or even the circumstances, of old Mother Beggarlegs. She would never tell; the children, at all events, were convinced o...

It was late afternoon when the train from the West deposited Hugh Finlay upon the Elgin platform, the close of one of those wide, wet, uncertain February days when the call of s...

The Cruickshank deputation returned across that North Atlantic which it was their desire to see so much more than ever the track of the flag, toward the middle of July. The shin...

It was the talk of the town, the pride of the market-place, Lorne Murchison’s having been selected to accompany what was known as the Cruickshank deputation to England. The gene...

Mr Milburn and Mr Winter had met in the act of unlocking their boxes at the post-office. Elgin had enjoyed postal delivery for several years, but not so much as to induce men of...

Christmas came and went. Dr Drummond had long accepted the innovation of a service on Christmas Day, as he agreed to the anthem while the collection was being taken up, to flowe...

From the day she stepped into it Mrs Murchison knew that the Plummer Place was going to be the bane of her existence. This may have been partly because Mr Murchison had bought i...

Octavius Milburn was not far beyond the facts when he said that the Elgin Chamber of Commerce was practically solid this time against the Liberal platform, though to what extent...

He and Hugh Finlay were sitting in the Doctor’s study, the pleasantest room in the house. It was lined with standard religious philosophy, standard poets, standard fiction, all...

It is determined with something like humour that communities very young should occupy themselves almost altogether with matters of grave and serious import. The vision of life a...

The progress of Mrs Kilbannon and Miss Christie Cameron up the river to Montreal, and so west to Elgin, was one series of surprises, most of them pleasant and instructive to suc...

“I am requested to announce,” said Dr Drummond after the singing of the last hymn, “the death, yesterday morning, of James Archibald Ramsay, for fifteen years an adherent and fo...

Octavius Milburn would not, I think, have objected to being considered, with relation to his own line in life, a representative man. He would have been wary to claim it, but if...

Alfred Hesketh had, after all, written to young Murchison about his immediate intention of sailing for Canada and visiting Elgin; the letter arrived a day or two later. It was b...

Lorne was thus an atom in the surge of London. The members of the deputation, as their business progressed, began to feel less like atoms and more like a body exerting an influe...

Dr Drummond and Mr Murchison stood together in the store door, over which the sign “John Murchison: Hardware,” had explained thirty years of varying commercial fortune. They had...

Alfred Hesketh was among the first to hear of Lorne’s nomination to represent the constituency of South Fox in the Dominion Parliament. The Milburns told him; it was Dora who ac...

The Milburns’ doorbell rang very early the morning of the election. The family and Alfred Hesketh were just sitting down to breakfast. Mr Hesketh was again the guest of the hous...

It was confidently expected by the Murchison family that when Stella was old enough she would be a good deal in society. Stella, without doubt, was well equipped for society; sh...

Mr Farquharson was to retain his seat until the early spring, for the double purpose of maintaining his influence upon an important commission of which he was chairman until the...

The office of Messrs Fulke, Warner, & Murchison was in Market Street, exactly over Scott’s drug store. Scott with his globular blue and red and green vessels in the window and h...

Peter Macfarlane had carried the big Bible up the pulpit steps of Knox Church, and arranged the glass of water and the notices to be given out beside it, twice every Sunday for...

In the wide stretches of a new country there is nothing to bound a local excitement, or to impede its transmission at full value. Elgin was a manufacturing town in southern Onta...

The suggestion that the Reverend Hugh Finlay preached from the pulpit of Knox Church “better sermons” than its permanent occupant, would have been justly considered absurd, and...

Imagination, one gathers, is a quality dispensed with of necessity in the practice of most professions, being that of which nature is, for some reason, most niggardly. There is...

If it were fair or adequate to so quote, I should be very much tempted to draw the history of Lorne Murchison’s sojourn in England from his letters home. He put his whole heart...

If anyone had told Mr Hugh Finlay, while he was pursuing his rigorous path to the ideals of the University of Edinburgh, that the first notable interest of his life in the calli...

“Lorne,” said Dora Milburn, in her most animated manner, “who do you think is coming to Elgin? Your London friend, Mr Hesketh! He’s going to stay with the Emmetts, and Mrs Emmet...

“You can never trust an Indian,” said Mrs Murchison at the anxious family council. “Well do I remember them when you were a little thing, Advena, hanging round the town on a mar...

They sat talking on the verandah in the close of the May evening, Mr and Mrs Murchison. The Plummer Place was the Murchison Place in the town’s mouth now, and that was only fair...