The denouement was what he had anticipated and what invariably takes place when men with calculating and professionally critical brains are for the first time profoundly stirred by a supremely magnetic spirit that appeals not to their emotions but to those instincts in which the memory of lost opportunities is effaced by confidence in future success. There was, too, a general feeling that Clark in the past was misunderstood. They had been hard on him. It was strange for men who were daily besought to invest in this or that to be told that their money was not asked for; that, as Clark had put in--the job was nearly done, capital expenditure nearly over and steady returns about to begin. And these returns, they reflected, would go straight out of the country to Philadelphia. All this and much more was moving through their minds when the president moved a vote of thanks which was tumultuously carried, whereupon Clark announced that the private car would leave that night for St. Marys, and that he and Mr. Semple would accompany such visitors as cared to spend a day or two at the works. That afternoon he sent a short letter to his mother. "I have been giving a talk on Toronto--it went quite well," he wrote in closing. "Canadians do not attract, but certainly interest me. There's much underneath that needs work to discover, and I have so little time for work of that kind." He glanced at the last sentence and nodded approvingly. Perhaps Canadians were too Scotch to be spontaneous. They were worthy, he admitted, but the word implied to him certain attributes that made life a little difficult, and, he silently concluded, a little cold. He would have desired them to be a trifle less deliberate and a shade more responsive. He felt that, however, he might persuade they would never fundamentally understand him, and perceived in this the cause of that condescension he had observed in so many Canadians toward the American. It did not worry him in the slightest as an American. He put it down to that self-satisfaction which is not infrequently acquired by self-made men in the process of their own manufacture, and to remnants of that cumulative British arrogance of forebears who had for centuries led the world. Early next morning the private car swung through the mining district of Sudbury. Clark's Toronto visitors were still asleep, but he was up and dressed and on the rear platform. The district, covered once by a green blanket of trees, now seemed blasted and dead. Close by were great piles of nickel ore, from which low clouds of acrid vapor rose into the bright air. Clark knew that the ore was being laboriously roasted in order to dissipate the sulphur it contained, prior to further treatment.