The complexion of things had undergone a change in twenty-five years and the traffic the returning “American” railroads now seek and appreciate comprises not only settler’s outfit and pressing needs, but everything from a car of seaweed to a circus train and the variety runs the gamut of raw and manufactured products. Your westerner unconsciously imbibes large ideas with the unpolluted ozone of the boundless prairies. He courts sleep in a metal bed from Ontario, bathes in a porcelain-lined tub and eats well. If he has them, he freely parts with his ducats for carloads of biscuits, butter, bacon and eggs; cheese, flour, canned vegetables, condensed milk, syrups, marmalades and sweets which come from the east. Recently a train of cars containing John Barleycorn’s headache provoker flaunted boldly across the horizon heading due west to the opulent personage who imports his pianos and autos in big lots regularly. Mark you, more than 200 carloads of “Niagara” grown grapes, peaches and mixed fruit roll out to the blooming prairie every season over bridge and ferry and into the tunnel’s insatiable maw at Sarnia. The substantial growth of Winnipeg, Portage la Prairie, Brandon, Regina, Calgary, Edmonton and Pacific Coast cities, and the mushroom proclivities of many a lesser burg, has given a marked impetus to the spirit of competition in manufacturing and railway circles. In the face of an exaggerated propaganda about bounding difficulties, and the like, and a strong but diminishing pro-Canadian sentiment, the men behind the gun annually dispatch and receive by way of Rouse’s Point, Suspension Bridge, Port Huron, The Sault, etc., merchandise worth thousands of dollars which our cousins eagerly solicit, working for the haul in conjunction with Canadian railway lines. Eight hundred carloads a year would be, according to some men’s estimate, a modest shewing, but, after all, conditions considered, it is a tidy, “found” business in and out of Canada for an individual “U.S.” line to secure or relinquish. I have known a single railroad’s catch in Ontario to exceed, on several occasions, three hundred carloads a month, 95 per cent. of this tonnage going to Manitoba and British Columbia destinations, the fresh fruit receiving exceptional attention and other commodities making scheduled runs to Winnipeg well within five days, and to Vancouver in twelve days’ time. It is estimated that via the various avenues between the two nations, from Coast to Coast, two carloads of freight a minute pass into the republic to the south as a result of the crusade of its railroad corporations. In more than one tight pinch “U.S.” railways have come to the fore, furnishing an expeditious alternative when shipper and consignee have been stewing over congested yards, crippled motive power, notorious scarcity of cars, strike and snow disadvantages which trouble every line sooner or later and which are not unknown to the men piloting the Canadian railway interests to success.