Happily, the appeal for railways and more railways did not strike the third vice-president as directly or as insistently as it did the president and vice-president. I was mainly kept busy in furnishing clothes and tools for the infant that was all legs and arms. It was never satisfied with its outfit; but, as far as the West was concerned, it never failed to earn the cost of its keep, and more. The facts about the guarantee of bonds of the original line showed that, so far from Mackenzie and Mann being the first importuners for railway construction under Government guarantees, the pressure came from another direction. The West was filling up. Farmers were going into districts long distances from railways. In 1905, the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta emerged from the North West Territories, with two brand new Governments, living on the electoral favour of people, most of whom were new to the West, were boundlessly confident of an immediately prosperous future, and were as clamorous for railways as famished lions are for flesh. In more than one case the first intimation that reached us of an obligation to construct a branch line was the news that a Legislature had passed an Act chartering a railway through a given area, and guaranteeing the bonds. This sort of demand was not confined to the West. Our entry into Quebec was followed by a constructive appearance in Nova Scotia. Coal measures having been acquired on the west coast of Cape Breton Island, the town of Inverness sprang into existence; and to bring the coal conveniently to shipping a sixty-seven mile railway to Port Hastings on the Strait of Canso was built. The Murray Government, wanting a line from Halifax to Yarmouth along the marvellously indented South Shore, raised the seven million dollars necessary to build it. Our people acquired the fifty miles of existing line from Yarmouth to Barrington; the Halifax and South Western was built to it; and the whole is part of the Canadian National system to-day. What Nova Scotia obtains, New Brunswick covets. New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island were the only eastern provinces that we were not working in within ten years of the founding of Dauphin in a wheat field. That we stayed out of New Brunswick wasn’t the fault of influential powers centering in Fredericton. For six weeks one deputation, importuning for railway construction, hovered about the Toronto office.