Nobody in Elgin can possibly have forgotten it.

The Elgin children had a rhyme about it-- The twenty-fourth of May Is the Queen's Birthday; If you don't give us a holiday, We'll all run away.
But Elgin was in Canada.

In Canada the twenty-fourth of May WAS the Queen's Birthday; and these were times and regions far removed from the prescription that the anniversary "should be observed" on any of those various outlying dates which by now, must have produced in her immediate people such indecision as to the date upon which Her Majesty really did come into the world.

That day, and that only, was the observed, the celebrated, a day with an essence in it, dawning more gloriously than other days and ending more regretfully, unless, indeed, it fell on a Sunday when it was "kept" on the Monday, with a slightly clouded feeling that it wasn't exactly the same thing.

Travelled persons, who had spent the anniversary there, were apt to come back with a poor opinion of its celebration in "the old country"-- a pleasant relish to the more-than-ever appreciated advantages of the new, the advantages that came out so by contrast.