Lord Strathcona is another of the wonderful men of Canada. He is indeed their “Grand Old Man.” One of the things that most struck Ibsen about the English-speaking race was their capacity for strenuous work at an advanced age. “Britishers often take up important positions in that span of life in which men of other nations are laying down their arms,” he once said to me. It was at a dinner given to Sir Henniker Heaton, of Post Office fame, on his retirement from Parliament (1910) by the Men of Kent, that I was particularly struck by Lord Strathcona. I was sitting next the old gentleman with Sir George Reid, the High Commissioner for Australia, on my other side. It was really most remarkable to find a man of ninety years of age so clear and concise, and practical and sensible in every way. With the rather weak voice of an old man, he spoke well and to the point, referring to the blessings of penny postage, which Henniker Heaton had made possible to all the English-speaking world, comparing it with the days when he first went to Canada seventy years before, and each letter cost four shillings, and eight shillings for a double page, and no envelopes were used, as they increased the weight. A fine well-chiselled head, Lord Strathcona has become a greater old man than he was a young man. His life has been remarkable for its steady Scotch perseverance and extraordinary luck, which, through the Hudson Bay Company and the Canadian Pacific Railway, gave him affluence. It was not brilliancy or genius that brought him to the position he attained, but just that hard-headed Scotch capacity for plodding. Luck leads to nothing without pluck. He talked quite cheerily of his next visit to Canada, the ocean holding no terrors for him, and he explained that his house in Montreal was always kept open and ready to step into. The same with his place at Glencoe, where he had only been able to spend four days in the year, much to his regret. It was midnight before that old gentleman went home, to begin an early and hard day the next morning, for he is indefatigable at his work for Canada as High Commissioner, and is to be found every day and all day in his office in Victoria Street at the age of ninety-two. “Yes,” he said, “Canada has a great future, though we must send out the right people. Ne’er-do-weels will do no good anywhere, and hard workers will always get on. Hard workers will get a hundred per cent greater reward in Canada than in Great Britain, while ne’er-do-weels will do worse, as there are no philanthropic institutions to bolster them up, or pamper them, as there are here.” He is modest—almost shy and retiring. Very courtly in manner, in spite of his humble origin; but, then, he is one of Nature’s gentlemen. Short in stature—the red hair almost white, but still peeping through the beard—his stoop and tottering, dragging gait denote age—also his slowness of speech; but his mind is all there—alive and active and full of thought and force.