E. A. James, who became the operating manager of the Canadian Northern lines after my removal to Toronto, used to tell how in 1886 he was one of the C.P.R. men who received no salary for four months. The C.P.R., though it had connected with the Pacific ocean, was like a poor man with a large and growing family, who finds his boys pushing their legs through their breeches faster than he can conveniently cover them. The original outbound traffic from the Territories had been buffalo bones, but the supply was limited. Though a line had been built through the mountains, snowslides compelled the erection of long and costly sheds to protect the track from the avalanches which were destroying life and property--nine men were carried to death as they were working on a bridge in 1885. The C.P.R. was on the Pacific shore; but there was no traffic with the Orient. Steamers had to be provided which could not possibly pay at the start. The first C.P.R. steamer from Vancouver to Asia carried two carloads of shingles and the bodies of several Chinamen piously being returned to their ancestral sepulchres. The capital of the North West Territories had been moved from Battleford to Regina with the building of the railway across the plains. Regina had about fifteen hundred people. When it had for ten years been the seat of government for a territory several times as large as the whole German Empire, if a new-comer wanted a house, the owner, instead of naming the rent, asked what he would pay. Calgary was the cowboy’s haunt, and the remittance man’s refuge. Edmonton was still at the back of beyond; several days’ journey from a railway. In Manitoba, Brandon was bravely telling itself that some day it would beat Portage la Prairie, and furtively dreaming of keeping up with Winnipeg, when once it had reached its stride. About twenty-five hundred people were on the southern slope of the Assiniboine; and a great deal of wheat was sold by farmers on Pacific Avenue, beside which stood several elevators. The grain came from far south, and far north--because there was no other railway to receive it. Brandon now stretches across the Assiniboine valley, right to the border of the Dominion Government’s experimental farm. The history of the acquisition of that farm for public purposes illustrates, as well as any episode I know of, what the position of land and agriculture was in a favoured section of Manitoba about the time I became a Manitoban. The original homesteader and pre-emptor of the Experimental Farm was a bachelor named Charlie Stewart, whose brother Jack took the land immediately west of him. Charlie had 320 acres, running down to the river, covering the northern slope, and taking in some of the upland. It had all the diversities which should distinguish an experimental station.