Keen-minded men like Mr. Van Horne and the Directors of the Canadian Pacific, saw that the way ahead bristled with difficulties. But they declined to quail. They had started on a great adventure and they were looking far ahead so steadily that they were saved from morbid contemplation of what lay between them and the final triumph. Their attitude toward the unproductive Lake Superior North Shore rock-wastes was typically prophetic. Despite the derisive critics who always have ridiculed the inception of big undertakings, the Canadian Pacific Railway men looked beyond the North Shore to the West-land that would someday become the granary of the Empire. Thus did they keep their courage alive. Like a famous warrior of old, they refused to see the intervening difficulties while they knew that across somewhere was the land of promise and the triumph that was worth a great struggle to attain. When Van Horne left that meeting of Directors in Montreal he hurried back to Winnipeg with the fire of a great railway-building battle in his eye. He felt he had the support of a strong and determined body of men, and they were fully satisfied that they had in Van Horne a man worth backing. They all began to realize very vividly, from the attitude of the financial world as above outlined, that the fabled achievements of Hercules would have to be made real in the building of the road. Van Horne, as the practical builder, set his mind on his own side of the work. His energy had been pretty well tested out in the States, but he knew perfectly well that anything he had done hitherto was child’s play compared to what he was now going to attempt. I was much interested the other day in coming across an item somewhere which suggested that, some years before, Van Horne had been contemplating building a railway in the Western States to tap the Canadian North-West. The vast unpeopled territory, labelled on his map, “British possessions,” appealed to his pioneering and adventurous spirit. It was the land of romance and mystery and of illimitable possibilities, where he could blaze new trails and build steel highways over a territory bigger than half-a-dozen European kingdoms. And now his opportunity had come in an unexpected, but better, fashion, and, as stated, he set his mind upon it with a sort of terrifying concentration. He found that Government contractors in 1881 had built some 160 miles of railway on the plains. He told the Directors in Montreal that he would build 500 miles on the prairie in 1882. He started in to do it and looked to the Directors to pay the bills. Some years after it was all over Van Horne said one day, as a tribute to the President, “Stephen did more work and harder work than I did. I had only to build the road, but Stephen had to find the money.” Those who remember them both are ready to say that the honours were even. Each did his part well and each had many helpers.