But when Sir Donald Smith had resigned from the Hudson’s Bay Company’s service, and became a politician, he schemed, with unheard-of daring, for even greater ends. At his suggestion, the Northwest Mounted Police was formed and sent out to take possession of the Great Plains. That added a wheat field to Canada which will very soon be able to feed the British empire. Next he speculated with every dollar he could raise, on a rusty railway track, which some American builders had abandoned because they were bankrupt. He got the rail head into Winnipeg, and a large trade opened with the United States. So began the boom that turned Manitoba into a populous country, where the buffalo had ranged before his coming. Now he was able to startle the Canadian government with the warning that unless they hurried up with a railway, binding the whole Dominion from ocean to ocean, all this rich western country would drift into the United States. When the government had failed in an attempt to build the impossible railway, Sir Donald got Montreal financiers together, cousins and friends of his own, staked every dollar he had, made them gamble as heavily, and set to work on the biggest road ever constructed. The country to be traversed was almost unexplored, almost uninhabited except by savages, fourteen hundred miles of rock and forest, a thousand miles of plains, six hundred miles of high alps. The syndicate building the road consisted of merchants in a provincial town not bigger then than Bristol, and when they met for business it was to wonder vaguely where the month’s pay was to come from for their men. They would part for the night to think, and by morning, Donald Smith would say, “Well, here’s another million--that ought to do for a bit.” On November seven, 1885, he drove the last spike, the golden spike, that completed the Canadian Pacific railway, and welded Canada into a living nation. Since then Lord Strathcona has endowed a university and given a big hospital to Montreal. At a cost of three hundred thousand pounds he presented the famous regiment known as Strathcona’s Horse, to the service of his country, and to-day, in his ninety-third year is working hard as Canadian high commissioner in London. XXI A. D. 1872 THE SEA HUNTERS The Japanese have heroes and adventurers just as fine as our own, most valiant and worthy knights. Unhappily I am too stupid to remember their honorable names, to understand their motives, or to make out exactly what they were playing at. It is rather a pity they have to be left out, but at least we can deal with one very odd phase of adventure in the Japan seas.