Regular passenger service was not inaugurated till the following spring, the first through train reaching Port Moody in June, 1886, and Vancouver in May, 1887. Port Moody was the statutory terminus, but the extension to Vancouver was inevitable, although Port Moody real estate owners naturally threw every obstacle in the way of the railway going farther. Vancouver had been swept by the great fire in 1886, but the courageous inhabitants started to rebuild and there were probably two or three thousand people, under the leadership of the first mayor, Mr. Malcolm A. MacLean, to greet the first train with rousing cheers and an address. It was a great day for Vancouver. A generation has since grown up which does not fully understand, because it does not know. But the people who know the story of the fire-swept area of rocks and blackened stumps into which the first Canadian Pacific train rolled that day, thirty-seven years ago, bringing in with it the dawn of a new day, do not forget. It linked the cold ashes of the new townsite to the throbbing power of Eastern Canada, and put a new name on the map where Orient and Occident looked each other in the face across the Pacific. It is rather a striking coincidence that I am writing these words on the 23rd of May, the anniversary of the arrival of the first Canadian Pacific Railway train in Vancouver in 1887. And on this day, in this Year of Grace 1924, the _Empress of Canada_, one of the Company’s great steamships, has just come back to this West Coast after a five months’ voyage around the globe. The space of time between is brief, considered as a span in history, but in that time the Canadian Pacific has not only covered the Dominion in all directions with its steel trails, but has compassed all the oceans with her floating palaces. That day in May, 1887, the prominent officials of the road on the Pacific Division were the heroes of the hour—a group of able and reliable men—Messrs. Harry Abbott, Richard Marpole, W. F. Salisbury, Henry J. Cambie, D. E. Brown, George McL. Brown, H. Connon, Lacy R. Johnson, A. J. Dana, with a faithful band, the forerunners of the present host, in their employ.