In the mood of reflection a train journey engenders, a sense of perspective slipped behind the eighteen months just over. Shot forth from my evangelical hot-house into colonial life, it now seemed to me rather wonderful that my utter ignorance had not landed me in yet worse muddles ... even in gaol.... One incident, oddly enough, stood out more clearly than the rest. But for my ridiculous inexperience of the common conditions of living, my complete want of _savoir faire_, my unacquaintance even with the ways of normal social behaviour, I might have now been in very different circumstances. A quite different career might easily have opened for me, a career in a railway, in the Canadian Pacific Railway, in fact, on one of whose trains we were then travelling. But for my stupid ignorance, an opening in the C.P.R. would certainly have been found for me, whether it led to a future or not. The incident, slight and trivial though it was, throws a characteristic light on the results of my upbringing. It happened in this way: Among my father’s acquaintance were the bigwigs of the Canadian Pacific Railway, who had shown him much courtesy on our earlier visit. The relationship this time was not of a religious kind; he was Financial Secretary to the Post Office; the C.P.R. carried the mails. Sir George Stephen and Sir Donald Stewart had not at that time received their peerages as My Lords Mount-Stephen and Strathcona; Sir William van Horne was still alive. To all of these I bore letters, though I delivered--by post to Montreal--only the one to Sir George, as President of the line. It met with the kindest possible response, and for several weeks I had been awaiting the return of T., an important official in Toronto, to whom my case had been explained, but who was away at the time, touring the west in his special car. The moment I returned, I felt reasonably sure that he would find me a place of some sort or other where I could at least make a start. He had, in fact, been asked to do so. With influence, too, in high quarters behind me, I had every reason to hope. The return of Mr. T. I awaited eagerly. He was a young man, I learned, of undoubted ability, but was at the same time a petty fellow, very pushing, very conceited, and a social snob of the most flagrant type. I was rather frightened, indeed, by what I heard, for a colonial social snob can be a very terrible creature, as I had already discovered.