In bidding me good-bye, and with the greatest kindness of manner, he added: "Well, my dear Watkin, go out and inquire. Master these questions, and, as soon as you return, come to me, and impart to me the information you have gained for me." Just as I was leaving, he added, "By the way, I have heard that the State of Maine wants to be annexed to our territory." I made no reply, but I doubted the correctness of the Duke's information. Still, with civil war just commencing, who could tell? "Sir," said old Gordon Bennett to me one day, while walking in his garden, beyond New York, "here everything is new, and nothing is settled." Failing health, brought on by grievous troubles, compelled the Duke to retire from office in the course of 1864, and on the 18th of October of that year he died; on the 18th October, 1865, he was followed by his friend, staunch and true, Lord Palmerston, who left his work and the world, with equal suddenness, on that day. But from that 17th July, 1861, I regarded myself as the Duke's unofficial, unpaid, never-tiring agent in these great enterprises, and, undoubtedly, in these three years, ending by his retirement and death, the seeds were sown. CHAPTER VI. _Port Moody--Victoria--San Francisco to Chicago_. At "Port Moody," and even at the new "Vancouver City," I felt some disappointment that the original idea of crossing amongst the islands to the north-east of Vancouver's Island, traversing that island, and making the Grand Pacific terminus at the fine harbour of Esquimalt, had not been realized. Halifax to Esquimalt was our old, well-worn plan. The "Tete Jaune" was our favoured pass. This plan, I believe, met the views both of Sir James Douglas and the Honorable Mr. Trutch. But I consoled myself with the reflection, that if we had not gained the best, we had secured the next best, grand scheme--a scheme which, as time goes on, will be extended and improved, as the original Pacific Railways of the United States have been. The sea service between "Port Moody" and "Victoria," Vancouver's Island, is well performed; and Victoria itself is an English town, with better paved streets, better electric lighting, and better in many other ways that might be named, than many bigger American and English towns I know of. I spent four delightful days in and about it, including an experimental trip, through the kindness of Mr. Dunsmuir --the proprietor of the Wellington Collieries, a few miles north of Nanaimo--over the new railway from Victoria to Nanaimo, constructed, with Government aid, by himself and Mr. Crocker, of San Francisco. I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of Sir Mathew Begbie, the Chief Justice of British Columbia, to whose undaunted courage Vancouver's Island and British Columbia owed law and order in the dangerous and difficult times of the gold discoveries.