carriers hasten to augment their revenues by coaxing and nursing this growing trade. [Illustration: R. M. MELVILLE, R.N., General S.S. Ticket Agent, Toronto and Captain, retired H.M. M.M., “S.S. Pekin.”] In 1875 the complacent east languidly condescended to heed insistent whispers concerning Canada’s vast Northwest. The tide of travel was diverging and began to carry with it in that direction prospectors, homesteaders and adventurous merchants bent on spying out locations in the prairie El Dorado. Dependent, of course, they levied on the mills of the east for food, clothing and implements. About this time Sir Hugh Childers, London, England, occupied the President’s chair directing the destinies of the Grand Trunk Railway, and the contemporary Canadian Pacific Railway official was (Sir) William Van Horne. Lucius Tuttle, President of Boston & Maine System, D. McNicoll, Vice-President, and C. E. E. Ussher, Passenger Traffic Manager, Canadian Pacific Railway, later on in the first flight and noteworthy examples of what determination and capacity accomplish, were going through a “course of sprouts” with Ontario lines which afterwards lost identity. Robert Kerr, former Passenger Traffic Manager “C.P.R.,” was “G.F. & P.A.” of the Northern Railway, and in his office situated at the foot of Spadina Avenue, Toronto, Tom Marshall and Henry Jago shoved the quill. Mr. Jago recently relinquished the duties of “G.E.P.A.” West Shore Road at New York. Henry Bourlier, so long associated with J. D. Hunter as western representatives of the Allan Line, was in 1874 ticket agent of G.T.R., in the old depot, and Tommy Jones was City Ticket Agent, Great Western Railway. Shippers hereabout will remember John Porteous, G.F.A., G.T.R., Montreal, Arthur White, G.F.A., Midland Railway, Port Hope, Ont., Jim “the penman” Thompson of the C.P.R. and Malcolm Murdock. Then it was that the star of Geo. B. Reeve and W. E. Davis began to twinkle; likewise, John W. Loud. All in modest positions at that time, they were fitting themselves for the exalted places they afterwards honorably filled in shaping the policy of the “Grand Trunk” and “Trunk Pacific” systems. The majority of these and other officials had frequent business intercourse with the various United States railway agents who visited Canada.