because there were positions waiting for him across the line any time he wished to go there. But he stood by his guns and said that he was not going back to the States—“I’m not going to leave the work I have begun. I’m going to see it through, no matter what position is open to me in the United States.” The time was to come, however, when even the iron nerves and the tremendous staying power of this apparently stolid and determined scion of the Netherlands were to be tried to the limit, and when Van Horne found in Canadian men the invincible spirit which made their joint work a sort of miraculous success. In the meantime, when he had done some highly necessary things in Winnipeg, in that fateful year of 1882, he went down to Montreal to meet President Stephen and the Directors. No doubt there was a mutual “sizing up” of each other, but with satisfactory results. The President and Van Horne took to each other at once, and became thenceforward the two that did the most perfect team work. But they could not have pulled the enterprise far without the steady, persistent co-operation of the other Directors. They all got into the harness and they all fell in with the Western teamster’s homely prescription for success: “Keep the tugs tight; never mind the hold-backs.” Thenceforth Van Horne became, till the completion of the Transcontinental, the trusted railway expert and, in this regard, completely supplanted Hill, who had been the only man of the original Canadian Pacific Syndicate who was a practical railroader. Under the leadership of Van Horne, Canada would now begin to grow her own railway men as a home product. One of the items taken up on the occasion of Mr. Van Horne’s first visit to Montreal was the construction of the Railway over the rock-wilderness on the North Shore of Lake Superior. The Mackenzie Government, as we have seen, thought that section could wait for a somewhat indefinite period, and in the meantime Mackenzie said that the great fresh-water sea could be used as a link in transportation. Then, when the Stephen-Hill Syndicate was formed, both of these gentlemen agreed with the policy of not constructing that section until there was more settlement in the West. But Stephen and Hill, not believing in the tardy water-stretches as links in railway construction, proposed to build from the East to Sault Ste. Marie, and there join up with a branch of Hill’s road, the St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba, to which, as the architect of their fortunes, they were financially and otherwise attached. This of course would have given Hill, in large measure, the control of Canadian traffic from East to West.