But following out our theory as to the importance of every place in service, my recollections swing from the contemplation of the work done by men of such remarkable ability and initiative as those above named, without whom the road could not have succeeded, and I recall more men than I could possibly mention in many volumes who out in the humbler places did their enormously important work. Many an hour, for instance, did I spend on the back platforms of the last coach on the old Southern Manitoba trains with Charlie Panser, than whom no better or more reliable roadmaster ever watched the ties and spikes and fish plates and switches anywhere. Nothing escaped his attention, and his little notebook recorded his observations in his own way. And I think in that connection of all the maintenance-of-way or section men, whose faithful labours through summer heat and winter cold keep the road-bed in amazingly perfect order. I have seen them fighting blizzards on the prairie and watching washouts or slides in the mountains, and all with such astonishing success that there is no more safe roadway in the world than the Canadian Pacific. I look back in another direction and see old Gideon Swain, a big, powerful man, who, despite his “rheumatics,” was general custodian and guard at the old Winnipeg station. He looked after everybody. He was as gentle as a woman in looking after children and their travel-weary parents, but woe betide the tough or loafer who tried to impose on the kindly old gentleman in whose big-hearted organism there slumbered a volcanic energy against wrong. Once I was there when the old board platform was cracking in a forty-below-zero morning. Swain was assisting some ladies and children on a train when two “smart” men came into the circle and began to swear about something. Turning round the old station-guard, who looked like a mountain in his coonskin coat, raised the big stick he always carried and told them in a thunderous voice to “shut up with talk like that before children.” The men tried to explain, but Swain would have none of it, and they simply had to subside and move away with the best grace possible, to escape the wrath of the guardian of the children. Possibly, like old Constable Richards of the Windsor Street Station in Montreal, of whom George Ham writes so fondly, he too has found congenial work beyond the Great Divide where they have both gone. Incidentally, that is a fine human story of old Constable Richards telling Lord Shaughnessy at the station gate in Montreal, when the President was returning from a trip, that he, the old keeper, had been overlooked when others had got an increase of pay, which apparently under regulations could not go to Richards, who was being kept on over the age-limit. The President, keeping some big people waiting, listened to the old gate-keeper’s story attentively. The next day Richards was delighted to get an envelope with notice of increase, and the back pay,