The spot at which the last spike was driven was named Craigellachie, as already intimated. The story of the name has not always been correctly told in this connection, beyond saying that the word was sent as a cablegram from Stephen to his fellow-directors in a crisis hour to encourage them not to give way, though the position seemed hopeless at the time. The expression is in reality not one word, but two, Craig Ellachie. This was the name of a grey rock in a Scottish glen, the home of a famous clan. And the legend is that when the clansmen went forth to war, the windswept pines and heather on the lonely hilltop whispered to the forth-going men the war-cry “Stand Fast, Craig Ellachie.” And now, in a new land, at a place where rails met through the steadfast persistence of these Scottish men and others, the mountains heard the echoing blow of the hammer which is in the forefront of the picture, “Driving the Last Spike.” Contrary to a general impression, created by the importance of the occasion and by some writers, the last spike was not of gold, but iron, like the other millions of them that had been driven all along the line. The event itself was so intensely dramatic that it needed not any conventional setting to give it _éclat_. Mr. Van Horne, who was not disposed to waste in any case, perhaps felt that iron was more significant of the spirit in which determined men had accomplished the apparently impossible. And so he had said in a matter of fact way, which was in itself abundantly thrilling: “The last spike will be as good an iron spike as there is between the two oceans, and any one who wants to see it driven will have to pay full fare.” The Directors who had passed through the fierce fire of the economic struggle to build the road could not afford, without a sort of sacrilege, to have anything conventional to bring people from the ends of the earth for the occasion. There was grim, but splendid, simplicity about the ceremony that was profoundly appropriate under all the circumstances. It was on November 7th, 1885, that the rails met in the Eagle Pass section of the road, and a group of men alighted from the train to be present when the last spike would be driven. By general concensus of opinion, the hammer to drive it was placed in the hands of Donald A. Smith. It was a great honour, but worthily bestowed on the white-haired veteran and victor in a hundred fights against obstacles. It was a far cry from the little village of Forres, in Morayshire, to the way station of Craigellachie in the mountains of Canada. But Donald A. Smith, the lad who had left Forres with all his worldly possessions in a carpet bag, and endured cold and snow-blindness in the Labrador till he rose to the higher places in the Hudson’s Bay Company, had now come to stand on Canada’s pioneer transcontinental steel trail and drive the spike that would link up, into a true Confederation, the scattered Provinces of the Dominion.