Montreal Quebec - Shortly before 2 o'clock large crowds gathered around the central kiosk, to await the coming of Sir John A. Macdonald, and within a few minutes of the appointed hour the right honourable gentleman arrived on the grounds. His arrival was the signal for an outbreak of cheers of a very hearty nature - The Gazette, Thursday, 22 Sep 1881.
 
There was an extra poignancy to the cheers in Montreal that day.
 
Sir John A. Macdonald, the country's first prime minister, had just returned to Canada and was visiting the Quebec Provincial Exhibition, when he had left four months before, there were many who believed they would never see him again.
 
Worn out by the battle, against bitter opposition from the Liberals, to win lush incentives for the backers of the Canadian Pacific Railway to revive their mammoth project, the 66-year-old Macdonald had fallen seriously ill.
 
"The long sittings (in Parliament) at last broke me down, and I had to betake me to my bed for a fortnight and am only now beginning to crawl about," he wrote to Sir Alexander Galt, Canada's first high commissioner to London, in late February 1881.
 
Though in recent years, Macdonald had tried to cut back, doubtless he was also paying for his notorious drinking.
 
By spring, he was sinking again, "great pain and disturbance in liver and bowels," as he wrote to his railways minister, Sir Charles Tupper.
 
Cancer was suspected.
 
Pressed by his family, Macdonald decided to go to England in search of rest, sounder medical advice, and perhaps a cure.
 
He and his wife, Agnes, sailed in May.
 
The plan worked.
 
A leading consultant, Dr. Andrew Clark, diagnosed not cancer but "catarrh of the stomach," which could be set right with simple food and sensible hours.
 
By September, Macdonald was fit to return, he stepped off the Sardinian in Quebec City on 17 Sep 1881 and immediately impressed everyone with his restored colour and jaunty air.
 
The impression of well-being was also apparent in Montreal four days later.
 
The Gazette, reporting on the light-hearted scene when Macdonald turned up at the provincial exhibition, said the crowd "noted with pleasure the manifest improvement in the Right Hon. gentleman's health since his last appearance in this city."
 
Macdonald rarely spurned a podium and a friendly audience, and this day was no exception.
 
After a brief welcoming address from Henry Bulmer, the exhibition's president, the prime minister stepped to the platform's railing and spoke, to repeated cheers, for 20 minutes or so.
 
Throughout, the good humour and the well-turned phrase for which he was famous were evident.
 
He thanked his friends and opponents alike for having wished him better health, adding, with no false modesty, "It has raised me in my own opinion."
 
He slyly took some credit for Canada's economic recovery after the international depression of the 1870s, bringing his audience to laughter when he said, "Of course, we Conservatives are of the opinion that it is for no sin of ours that all those benefits have been poured upon us."
 
Montreal was ideally placed to benefit from the new prosperity, "There is a boom, no doubt, ringing through the streets and in the places of public business in Montreal which makes my heart warmly glow within me. Situated as it is at the foot of river navigation, it ought always to be the centre of our foreign commerce, and from its other advantages of water power and otherwise, it ought also to be the great manufacturing centre not only of the Province of Quebec but of the whole Dominion of Canada."
 
More loud cheers.
 
He left no doubt that he was thankful to be home once again, "While the climate of the mother country was beneficial, I yearned to come back to Canada, and I never experienced so much pleasure as when we rounded Indian Cove and saw the beautiful scene that bears on the view of the traveller at the close of his ocean voyage."
 
The love-in continued that evening at a meeting of Conservatives in the St. Lawrence Hall.
 
Preceded by a piper, Macdonald entered the hotel's main assembly room to an enthusiastic reception, "cheer after cheer ringing out to greet the chieftain."
 
The Gazette published several stanzas of doggerel from the pen of someone signing himself Senex, in which shameless idolatry is exceeded only by an absence of poetic talent:
 
Welcome, a thousand welcomes home,
 
With health and strength renewed.
 
A grateful people's voice proclaims
 
Their love and gratitude!
 
A happy people's prayers ascend
 
For one so justly dear,
 
That health and life prolonged be yours
 
For many a coming year!
 
Macdonald's health would be prolonged for just two years, when mental and physical exhaustion once again overwhelmed him for a time.
 
It was a prelude to the increasing debility of the last year and a half of his life.
 
He died on 6 Jun 1891.
 
John Kalbfleisch.