Twice the Company had to apply to the Government for either loan or guarantee of bonds and during the months when these matters were hanging in the balance, the founders of the Company and the General Manager and Purchasing Agent, as well as other responsible officials, passed through what can be truly called, agonizing experiences. To these experiences they gave utterance at times. It is anticipating somewhat and disregarding sequence for the moment, but during those years we have it on the word of friends that Stephen returned one evening to the Russel House after a vain effort to get Sir John A. Macdonald to say that he would recommend that a loan should be made. Stephen, upon whom, as President, there was unusual strain, threw himself into a chair in the rotunda and when an acquaintance passing the time of day said, “How are you?” Stephen, without looking up, replied “I feel like a ruined man.” One day he shed tears in the office of Mr. Collingwood Schreiber, not because he cared for himself, but because it looked as if the whole great project of the Canadian Pacific was going to a crash that would block the future of Canada for a time at least. On another night Mr. Stephen, after a hopeless sort of interview with the Government, came down the Russel House stair grip in hand and told Senator Frank Smith, a gallant friend of the railway, that he was going to Montreal to make a personal assignment of all he possessed. Even the redoubtable Van Horne wired frantically one day that the pay car could not go out because there was nothing in it! On another day he said to Mr. Schreiber at Ottawa, “If the Government does not help us we are finished.” And shortly afterwards, meeting Sir John Macdonald in the corridor, he said, “Sir John, we are dangling over the pit of hell and ruin.” On another occasion, when the Directors were in session, the Chairman said, “Gentlemen, it looks as if we had to burst——” But Donald A. Smith looked hard at him and said, “It may be that we must succumb, but that must not be as long as we individually have a dollar.” And it is related that he went out and raised on his personal security enough to meet pressing accounts which Shaughnessy said had to be paid at once.