One wonders yet at the fact that Van Horne left an assured career in his own land, the richest country in the world, to come to the Canadian West, which was then, and for some years afterwards, as I recall it, a sort of illimitable and sparsely inhabited wilderness. He came to undertake a railway building project such as neither his own country or any other in the world had ever planned in similar circumstances. No doubt he, with the keen mentality which flashed out in many varied gifts, foresaw the country’s future. But no doubt also, as his biographer above-mentioned affirms, and as men, like Sir George Bury, who were intimately yoked up with him in practical work on the road declare, it was the difficulty of the work that successfully appealed to him. The fighting spirit of his imperturbable and determined Netherlands ancestors rose to the challenge of the opportunity, to satisfy what Mr. Vaughan calls his master passion “to make things grow and put new places on the map.” So, after visiting Winnipeg and the plains, Van Horne accepted Stephen’s offer and came from the States to become a great Canadian who, without forgetting his lineage, grew into a deep devotion to his adopted country. Reference has been made already to the many-sidedness of this colossus amongst railway builders. Once, many years after his coming, I recall meeting Mr. Van Horne at a dinner in Lord Strathcona’s house in Montreal, when nearly all the leading business men of their group were present. I happened to be in the city at the time, and as Lord Strathcona and my father had been close friends in the old Fort Garry days, he asked me up to that dinner. Gentleman of the old school that he was, with the courteous manner and considerateness of the perfect host, he asked Mr. Van Horne to show me through the picture gallery. I had known Mr. Van Horne in a general way as a forceful railroader who had begun in railway work at the age of fourteen, and knew it from the ground upwards in practically all departments, and I also knew something of his taste in art. But I was hardly prepared for the wealth of the acquaintance with painting and literature which his conversation, in easy, flowing language, revealed that evening. And yet this was the same Van Horne who could make men quake with the strength of his invective against incompetency or carelessness in work, and who was apparently at times a mere impersonal dynamo for the purpose of driving seemingly impossible enterprises to completion. There was something more than Napoleonic in the way in which he abolished the word “fail” from the dictionary as he drove his undertakings onward. And yet again he was an inveterate player of practical jokes, and was, on occasion, a sort of big boy with a sufficient spice of fun about him to keep things from becoming dull. If he knew how to work he also knew how to relax, and that is a great thing.