Van Horne were in the Board Room in Montreal when it was delivered. They read it with a sort of glad surprise too deep for words. They were matter-of-fact men, but they shook hands with some emotion. Then they threw some of the chairs about and danced around the room. The relief to the tension had come and they had to relax somehow. They were human. They knew in that hour that the road would be completed. And out along the line in the great mountains there would be a station called Revelstoke. And where the steel met from the East and the West, there would be another station named “Craigellachie,” after the Gælic cablegram meaning “stand fast,” which Stephen, as we have already recorded, had sent to his cousin, Donald A. Smith (Strathcona), in the dark days some years before. The name would remind succeeding generations of the men whose steadfastness was like unto that of Craigellachie, the unshaken rock in the old glen of Strathspey. CHAPTER XI Ocean to Ocean As we have followed the story of railway construction across the continent, over the North Shore, athwart the vast plains and on into the mountains, our eyes have been on the Western sea. It was to win and hold the illimitable spaces of the North-West that the Canadian Pacific was first conceived, and it was specially to link up British Columbia with her sister Provinces to the east that the iron horses were being driven on steel trails to drink on the sunset shore of Canada. But we must always keep in mind the fact that this railway was to be transcontinental in its extent, and that it was down by the Atlantic, first of all, that men who saw visions and dreamed dreams forecasted its great destiny by land and sea. They saw it spanning the continent, continuing across the Pacific, and finally, under one system, girdling the globe. Others, earlier, made conjectures and expressed vague hopes, but the most clear and confident note of prophecy was sounded by Joseph Howe at Halifax, in 1851, in the famous speech quoted in our first chapter. Later, in the old Province of Quebec, where in a sense Confederation was first definitely outlined at the Conference of the Fathers of Confederation in 1864, this prophetic note was taken up and rendered more emphatic. Thus were the Atlantic statesmen planning ahead.