Bob Watson was a mechanic. He was sent in 1876 by the Goldie, McCullough Company of Galt, to install the machinery in the first mill erected at the Portage. He also put up a mill at Stonewall, and started in business for himself. He was in the town, and of the town. The fire brigade had no more vigorous member. His machine shop was a place of popular resort. The farmers knew no more consistent, more lenient friend. Largely because of his popularity he was sent to Ottawa in 1882 as M.P. for Marquette. A partnership with his brother was formed in 1886. After ten years at Ottawa he joined the Greenway Government in 1892, as a conscientious, hard-working Minister of Public Works; and stayed with it till its end in 1900, when the Senate claimed him. Everybody calls him Bob, and everybody will agree that though there have been more brilliant Portage men--a former premier of British Columbia and a former premier of Canada, Mr. Meighen, both graduated into statesmanship from their modest offices on Saskatchewan Avenue--there have been none more admirable than the senator. Red Fife was not as popular a wheat as it afterwards became, thanks largely to the experiments of a much-abused railway. The still earlier Marquis had not been evolved by Dr. Saunders. On the Portage Plains, where frozen wheat is now a rarity, it was then too common a drug on the market--I could tell of a man bringing a load into town that he could not sell at any price. The danger of frost is when the milk is in the ear. In those days it was thought that a smoke over the land would prevent the freezing temperature reaching the ground, and that smoke and its accompanying warmth would keep a current of air moving over the fields of grain and thus save it from damage. The farmers cut weeds, and put them and straw in windrows round their fields, ready to be fired at the critical hour, which was usually about four or five o’clock on August mornings. We installed a big light on a staff at the top of the highest building, the Farmers’ Elevator. We kept in touch with the meteorological office at Winnipeg, and if we were advised that frost seemed to be imminent, about midnight the big arc lamp was set going, and in the dark hours before the dawn the protective fires would be seen flickering across the plains. It cannot be told precisely whether this procedure really saved anything to the farmers. But it is true that, not only was it to our interest to do what we could to assure good crops to the farmers, on which the town’s prosperity depended, but the element of public service entered actively into this revival, for agriculture’s sake, of the beacon method of warning against fleshlier invaders than Jack Frost.