NARROW streets, soaring skyscrapers, large bright-red street cars, innumerable impatient motors, crowds on the pavements, crowds in the trolleys, crowds in the shops. And over the whirlpool of King and Yonge an invisible presence, the damp breath of the lake.

Travellers from lodged for a moment in one of the down-town hotels, from bedroom windows high over the roof tops catch a glimpse of shipping, a sheltering expanse of Island guarding the harbour, and through the hum of the city hear the sound of a chime of English bells from the tower of St. James or of the Metropolitan Church.

From the blue of her southern boundary, the Bay to the green of the high ridge that is her northern threshold, lies Toronto–seething with activity. A half dozen blocks north of King and Yonge Streets there is a spot of concentrated fury where Queen Street cuts across, and great departmental stores draw a steady stream of shoppers from the four ends of the city. Slightly to the east is the Massey Music Hall, the centre of musical activity for the Province, and near this point some of the big publishing houses are situated. There are miles of shops, and in some districts of factories; street after street in which the brass plates of doctors and dentists label almost every house; banks are nearly as prevalent as drug stores; a great city of a hospital rears up almost sheer out of the pavement on College Street. Its neighbour, the Conservatory of Music, draws an average attendance of thousands of students a year.

And then there is a sudden blossoming of gray stone buildings, interspersed with a few of unfriendly brick, set among trees–the University of Toronto in Queen's Park. Here the old Alma Mater, founded in 1827, the original grey stone building erected in 1856, still excels in beauty her fast-growing family. The tower and carved stone doorway are among the most perfect examples of Norman architecture on the continent. Hart House, a club for graduates and undergraduates, also of gray stone, with magnificent hall for dining, libraries, study rooms, gymnasium and Little Theatre is a great students' centre. Hart House is Toronto's gigantic modern flower of early-English architecture, a building unique in perfection on this continent.

The city sweeps up the hill. The traveller finds at the head of Avenue Road the famous old Eton of Ontario, Upper Canada College, founded in 1829, the preparatory school of many of the outstanding men of the Dominion.

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"THE CARVED STONE DOORWAY."

He finds to the east of this Hill Road, Rosedale, one of the most picturesque residential sections of any modern city. Houses of a hundred modes of architecture but, strange fact, all interesting and harmonious are built on sites for the most part overlooking ravines. Not small, well ordered ravines but deep, wooded, lush ferny, brook-haunted bits of wilderness; living pools of green in summer with lights, seen from bridges or casement-windows, like glow-worms faintly illuminating far depths. In winter there is a tangle of frozen branches, or dark trees making slender etchings against the gray sky. Government House–a huge pile–stands at the easterly end of Rosedale.

West of Avenue Road, on the Hill top, runs the wide St. Clair Avenue, and directly north and south of it is the Hill section proper. Houses such as "Bellevue," "Glen Edythe," the Nordheimer residence, "Ravenswood," a site now occupied by "Ardwold," the magnificent town house of the late Sir John Eaton, have, for half a century, looked through trees that were part of a primeval forest over a growing city to the rim of water miles away. The modern castle of Sir Henry Pellatt, westward on the same ridge, stands feudal-like, its feet plunged into a huddle of dingy little streets.

So Toronto, humming on its commercial way, sometimes surprises one with a lyric or an epic touch.

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"THE WHIRLPOOL OF KING AND YONGE."

Trees-in-the-water–so the Indians saw and named it as they sighted from their low-riding canoes the long stretch of sandy land that is called The Island.

Gentle folk were the Mississaugas, who loved the Valley of the Humber and there pitched their tents and invited their friends. A Place of Meeting, they called the little encampment, and there was prophecy in the name. The French also observed the location. A trading post, Fort Rouille, was established in 1748. In 1878 the site became the ground of the Industrial Exhibition Association of Toronto–a Meeting Place for a million people every September.

The French are as fond of seizing a strategic position as the next people. And they had secured one here at the southern end of the fur trade route from Georgian Bay via Lake Simcoe. Nevertheless the first small garrison was withdrawn to aid the defence of Niagara against the British. Then, with the passing of the French regime, and in 1793, the Old Fort was chosen as the site of the future capital of Upper Canada.

Governor Simcoe, with his officials and some troops from Niagara, established themselves facing the beautiful Bay with its sheltering sandy shoals and its comfortable distance from the frontier. A little town was laid out, re-named York, and its streets were sedately christened after the Royal Family, as any good street should be in the gallant days of the Loyalists. There was Caroline and Frederick and George, and Princess and Palace and King and Duke and Duchess.

But Governor Simcoe laid out his toy town with the idea of extension in his mind, and he planned three main roads which his rangers proceeded to open up. Westward and south the road led to Niagara and was named after Henry Dundas, Viscount Melville. Eastward was the Kingston Road, and the third leading north to Lake Simcoe was named after Sir George Yonge, a personal friend of Simcoe. And these roads remain unchanged in name as the old down-town streets do in their perambulations. But the Royal names have been discarded in all but a few instances.

Little wars, small military episodes, flashed fire upon those early days. The town was sufficiently embroiled in the War of 1812 as to be captured by the Americans in 1813 and held for eleven days. The Parliament Buildings were burned, the fortifications attacked and worst of all the invading troops were billeted upon indignant citizens. The ladies of York were all in a flutter. When the enemy retired there was a much-relieved meeting in Jordan's Hotel, on King Street. A block house built at this period still stands on the Old Fort Road.

Jordan's Hotel was dear to the hearts of York. Dr. Henry Scadding in his delightful "Toronto of Old" says that in 1820 this tavern "looked antique compared with the Mansion House put up beside it." One of the few town pump stations was nearby. The Half-Way House, built in 1816, was a favourite resort of soldiers. It bore a famous sign:

Within this hive we're all alive,
Good liquor makes us funny,
If you be dry step in and try
The flavour of our honey.

The important dwelling houses of the town were built in the vicinity of what is now Front Street, though Beverley House, the home of Judge Beverley Robinson (and temporarily of Lord Sydenham) was some blocks further north. The Denisons built Bellevue House on Queen Street in 1815, and The Grange was erected two years later by Mr. D'Arcy Boulton, whose daughter-in-law married Goldwin Smith. The first summer residence of York was Castle Frank, which Governor Simcoe erected on the brow of a hill overlooking the Don Valley. It was a picturesque log house, with a narrow carriage road leading from the town to the bushland retreat. Along this road many parties of cavaliers and ladies used to wend their way from the town to picnics and fêtes on summer days and nights gone a century ago.

Colonial York–gay, muddy, adventurous and British to the core–holds picturesque pages. Anison North has given interesting glimpses of these days in "The Forging of the Pikes" a novel of the Mackenzie Rebellion. She writes of St. James Cathedral on a Sunday morning in 1837. Stained windows, deep transepts, high pews, people "arriving in crowds, some in very fine coaches with footmen . . . the women were quite fine enough in their silk gowns and Paisley shawls and gay bonnets . . . soon I came to know where sat the Baldwins, the Powells, the Jarvises, the Ridouts, the Boultons, the Cawthras, and many others, including Chief Justice Robinson himself, who was one of the handsomest men I ever saw."

With the Rebellion of 1837 the Colonial Period ended. Five years before the name of York had been replaced by the early Toronto and through the magic that sometimes lies in names it cast off outward sedateness, and with it perhaps inherent joviality, and, swift-footed as the Indian tribe that first christened it, the young town entered upon that race for the conquest of everything in sight that still distinguishes it. A bright Runner in a straight line is Toronto. The early trees-in-the-water, streets in the water, mud, uncertainty–all this solidified into cement, and proper parks, and great discernment as to enterprise of all sorts.

The Rebellion of William Lyon Mackenzie and his supporters, who objected to the administration of public affairs by the Family Compact, was quickly subdued, and a few rebels hanged in the jail-yard. In 1866 there was the Fenian Raid, and the Fenians too were bound to retire. The progress of Toronto was not to be stayed by this sort of thing. It ran brightly on, punctuated all along the way by a steady influx of retired farmers, villagers, townsfolk the Province over; by the acquisition of great manufacturing plants and the constant building up of schools, so that as wealth makes wealth, this magnetic power increased upon itself and it came to pass that in little more than a century the half million mark is passed.

"Toronto–a Place of Meeting," said the gentle Mississaugas.

"Toronto–a safe site," echoed Governor Simcoe.

A good deal Canadian in atmosphere, a little American in manner, wholly British in feeling, Toronto is a stimulating city in which to live and work. If, swift early Runner, it struts a little now as it grows, that phase too will pass. Once an adopted daughter, Isabella Valancy Crawford, a pioneer Canadian poet, wrote of Toronto who had systematically ignored her.

She hears the marching centuries which Time
Leads up the dark peaks of Eternity:
The pulses of past warriors bound in her;
The pulses of dead sages beat in her;
The pulses of dead merchants stir in her.

Already the 'pulses of past warriors.' The South African Memorial by Walter Allward, the Toronto sculptor, stands on University Avenue, just south of the Armouries. In point of value to the city it is, so far as a single work of art is concerned, the greatest treasure. Here is the young mother, Canada, sending out her sons to battle for the Empire. The greatest art contains not only beauty but revelation. The gesture of Canada, who had sent but few sons when this monument was raised to celebrate a peace, expresses readiness for any future. And when the doors of the Armouries opened on a midsummer noon of August 1914, and the first men of the First Contingent marched out and down the Avenue on their way to Camp, the most vital figure on the crowded thoroughfare was Allward's young Canada–looking out into the distance, hearing the first footsteps go by to the awful war, knowing that there would be increasing footsteps to follow. Crowning the granite shaft, with wings outstretched and arms uplifted, is an angel of victory over-topping the mother and her sons.

'Centres' of commerce, art or education, taken singly or in combination, make great cities. Toronto has always possessed them. After the primitive centres of a hundred years had faded, and the famous houses and public buildings and warehouses of even half a century ago were changing, there came the new meeting places of the eighties and nineties.

The 'Sage of The Grange,' Professor Goldwin Smith was known the English-speaking world over as a brilliant if caustic philosopher and critic. He used to gather visitors of note from many places in the fine old house standing so grandly on its tree-decked lawns. The same house, now remodelled, again opens its doors. Now the visitors are lovers of pictures, for this is the Toronto Art Museum in which, during the winter season, many Views are held, exhibitions of the work of Canadian artists interspersed by loan collections of foreign pictures.

Algernon Blackwood, the English novelist, in a letter to the writer says "Beverley Street recalls my student days in Toronto when I used to go up and down that quiet street to haunt the garden of The Grange. Can you still hear the crows and the rooks in those mighty trees?"

Trinity College, out on Queen Street, beautiful of design, was a fit setting for the residence of Professor William Clarke, an Englishman whose brilliant lectures on literature endeared him to a generation of Canadians.

And there was a certain dingy office in a lane-like street that was also a centre in the early eighties. "The Week" was founded by Goldwin Smith, with Charles G. D. Roberts as its first editor. The names of Lampman, Bliss Carman, W. W. Campbell and other distinguished writers appear frequently. It is interesting to know that in those early days the woman editor was already in evidence. We find that Mrs. J. W. F. Harrison, known by her pen name 'Seranus,' was the musical and then the literary editor. Sara Jeanette Duncan, of Brantford, the well-known novelist, was also an editor.

To-day the varied life of Toronto is made up of many centres of as many interests. I leave to guide books and histories the list of her public buildings and industries. Other phases of her life enchant me more. In the Royal Ontario Museum of Archaeology, for instance, the collection of Chinese paintings and vases, among many other notable collections, is unique on this continent. Exploring those ancient blues and greens one forgets that this is a modern commercial and educational centre. An hour later, motoring in High Park, or roaming through acre after acre of its hills and dales, one is lost again amid blues and greens. Ten minutes by motor will bring one to a sort of censored Coney Island on the wide Lake Front Boulevard.