Probably Rod was the only Norquay under that roof who had so clear a vision of all that had preceded him, and so faint a comprehension of his future. The normal youngster of that age is eagerly forward-looking. He has no retrospect. He is full of impatient hopes, dreams, desires, whenever he lifts his eyes beyond the absorbing present. Rod deliberately refrained from lifting the curtain of the future. When he went beyond the engrossing moment, he looked backward over the history of his country and his family which were so closely knit,--and he saw all the great adventures, the exciting struggles, the foundation-laying and the slow purposeful upbuilding, as something which had become a finished process before he was born. He would spend hours mooning over his great-great-grandfather's journal and feel a pang of regret that he had not lived in those quickening days. They were gone. The land was tamed. The Chilcotins would never again come raiding. The sea otters were vanished along with the men who hunted them. The trading vessel, square-rigged or fore-and-after, had given way to the steam tramp. From Land's End to the Strait of Juan de Fuca was a twenty-day voyage instead of thirty weeks. Law, order, custom molded men now. The frontiers were charted and surveyed. What was the use of being born with a spirit that chafed against the dull certainties of a world in which everything was known, defined, reduced to a formula? The world that Rod knew was like the Norquay family,--static! So he summed it up. All the great deeds done, or at any rate the necessity, the spur of doing removed beyond him. Those silent shores to which Roderick Sylvester Norquay sailed with Vancouver in 1792 were cluttered with grubby towns, marked off into private areas for individual exploitation. Those inland seas which they had explored and charted were speckled with vessels in the lumber trade, the coal trade, coastal transport, fisheries. The forests were falling under the axes of ten thousand loggers. There was only the adventure, the struggle, the arid business of making money. And no Norquay had a vital need of doing that. Their forefathers had attended shrewdly to the acquisition of land and timber when it could be had for the taking. The Norquays did not need to make money. They had it. It came rolling in to them. They could sit still or play; it was all one. Static! That was the term Rod used.