have seen.” The matchlessly inspiring scenery of this route will always remain to make it an irresistible magnet to tourists and travellers generally. For the rest of it, any problem in gradients will vanish at any time desired, by the lowering of grades and electrification, if ever the situation demands such action. Before leaving the Kicking Horse Pass discussion, it may be interesting to some of our readers to relate the origin of this striking name. When I first went down along the river I recall some one on the train who told his version by saying that the name was given to the river because as it rushed down the grade it was constantly thrown back in splashing spray by the rocks, as if by the kicking of a horse. This is a poetic description of a very turbulent stream where the rocks look vicious enough to kick anything to pieces that might be hurled against them, but it is not the real origin of the name. The prosaic fact is that when, in 1858, Capt. Palliser and Dr. (later Sir James) Hector were exploring the region they were leaving the camp by this river one morning and Hector, while trying to round up a straying packhorse, was kicked in the chest by his own riding horse as he was passing him. Hector was laid up in the camp for several days, and the incident was so impressed on the explorers that they anathematized and immortalized this lively animal by calling the river and pass after him. When Mr. Van Horne went back to Winnipeg from the meeting of Directors in 1882, things looked well around that Western gateway city because the advent of the Canadian Pacific had given rise to a real-estate boom whose intoxicating influence had gone to people’s heads so that they were all hilariously rich, at least in imagination, and, therefore, indomitably optimistic. This phase of undue excitement passed, but Winnipeg is my old home city, and hence I am able to testify that in no city with which I am acquainted was it so true, as it used to be said of the people of Winnipeg, that “they lived on hope.”