When Van Horne met the Directors in Montreal they discussed also the momentous question of the route to be followed. When Sandford Fleming was Chief Engineer during the regime of the Hon. Alexander Mackenzie, the line was mapped out to cross the Red River at Selkirk, thence westward through the North Saskatchewan country, crossing the Rockies by the Yellowhead Pass, and so on to the Pacific. But the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, in 1881, decided for a southerly route through Winnipeg, and across the plains and then through the mountains by the Kicking Horse Pass. For the most part the engineers preferred the Yellowhead Pass, on account of the comparatively easy grades and fewer obstacles in the way. Van Horne favoured the Kicking Horse Pass and the Directors agreed to that also, although up to that time there had been no pass discovered through the Selkirk range that lay right beyond the Rockies like an impregnable rampart. But if no pass was found through the Selkirks, the track might be laid in a more roundabout way along the Columbia. Once again these men were making a big venture under the leadership of Van Horne, who seemed to be having pretty much his own way at the Board meeting. The Directors had secured him at a large salary because he was a practical railroader, and they were evidently going to give him opportunity to earn it by letting him assume heavy responsibility. The change of route from the Yellowhead to the more difficult Kicking Horse Pass has been much discussed and, in some considerable degree, criticized. But there were weighty reasons for the change as Van Horne saw them. The transcontinental route from the East through the Kicking Horse Pass was one hundred and twenty-five miles shorter that the other, and that is an item, when the costs of construction were considered, as well as time in the trip across the continent. Besides that, the Kicking Horse route, if adopted, would preclude the possibility of any railway building between the Canadian Pacific and the boundary-line and thus draining traffic towards the States. The great valleys of the Kootenay, the Columbia and the Okanagan were more accessible by the Kicking Horse route, and such valleys are supreme in productiveness in British Columbia. And I am not sure but Mr. Van Horne, with his strong sense of the artistic and the scenic splendour of the southern route, felt that in the future it would, as a tourist route of unequalled attractiveness, become one of the greatest and most remunerative assets of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The supremacy of the Kicking Horse route in that regard has been fully recognized by world-travellers. The famous Sir Edwin Arnold, author of “The Light of Asia,” who had been in practically all countries, one day said to Mr. Castell Hopkins, of Toronto, as they met on a Canadian Pacific Railway train in the Rockies, “These vast ranges exceed in grandeur the Himalayas, the Alps and the Andes, all of which I