Shorter Notice
Early in 1939 Miss Bosanquet (bearer of a name with varied and honourable implications in the last half-century) decided to go to Canada, ride from coast to coast on horseback, and if her experiences justified it, write a book about them. She concluded that they did justify it, and few of her readers will disagree with her. Not every- thing went according to plan. For one thing the war intervened, and instead of getting home before 0939 ended Miss Bosanquet was kept in Canada some four years. From the point of view of her book that was no disadvantage, though most of it is devoted to the few months of her notable ride. It is an entertaining, unaffected record of unusual and for the most part agreeable experiences—of strange encounters, for example, with a grizzly erect on his hind legs at a turn of the road, of mountain passes, of rushing rivers, of constant and spontaneous hospitality offered by prairie dwellers of Icelandic or Norwegian or Ukrainian or Scottish origin, or by full-blooded Red Indians. The book thus sheds valuable side-lights on Canada's cosmopolitan social life. But perhaps it will appeal most to lovers of horses like Miss Bosanquet herself. Nothing in the book is better than the story of how, having exchanged her first mount, Timothy, at Calgary, for a more serviceable animal, Jonty, she became so charged with remorse with every mile she rode that by an impulse she never regretted she dashed back to Calgary, re-purchased Timothy, and ended the journey with two horses instead of one. A book with considerable underlying value as well as of sustained and lively interest.
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