So far as the Intercolonial Railway appears before the public to-day, those engineers who were for years engaged in its construction are as if they never existed. I was struck with the similitude between the life of the engineer and of the soldier. There is much which is identical in the two professions. In both, privations and hardships are endured. In both, self-sacrifice is called for. In both, special qualities are demanded to gain desired results; and the possessors of them for a time obtain prominence, to pass out of mind with the necessity for their service, and to be forgotten and uncared for. It is peculiarly during an hour of patient waiting in the advanced hours of night that much of the past comes vividly before us. My mind reverted to all the incidents connected with the history of this national railway. I recalled many recollections of the Railway Commissioners whom the Government appointed at that date, and I did my best to forget many an unpleasantness. Differences of view were not unfrequent. They seemed important enough at the time, but on looking back to them now, how insignificant many of them appear. Those mistakes which permanently affect the public interests are only to be deplored. The train had just passed over the scene of one of the most glaring of these departures from a wise policy. In order to serve purely local interests, the railway was diverted many miles out of its true direction. The proper location would have cost less; the line, when completed, would have been better in an engineering point of view; the distance would have been ten miles shorter. But the local interests, in themselves insignificant, were sustained by political influence. Whatever administration was in power, there was some one prominent politician to advocate the location by the circuitous route. In this one point men on opposite sides of the House could meet on common ground, and in spite of all remonstrances[C] and regardless of the facts, their individual interests prevailed. Thus the country was saddled with an unnecessary expense of construction of a needless increased length of line with its perpetual maintenance, and every person, and every ton of goods, entering or leaving Nova Scotia, has to pay a mileage charge of conveyance over ten extra unnecessary miles: a tax on the travelling public and the commerce of the country for ever! As I looked along the track into the darkness, I remembered that some fifteen years had passed since the troubles and unpleasantness of those days, and it came to my mind that the prominent actors in the events are dead. I was struck with the truth of our experience in the vanity of human wishes and the worse than folly of sacrificing permanent public interests for matters of passing moment.