For three years, while the North Western was hoping against hope that it would be able to stand ultimately on its own feet, and Mr. Nanton, the Sir Augustus of these more expansive years, was keeping an extremely watchful eye on all expenditures, I was doing my best for a small family. At night I was the first auditor of the Canadian Fire Insurance Company, the creation of R. T. Riley, who doesn’t live as many anxious days now as he did then, and who was later to become a highly valued colleague on the National Railways’ directorate. At night also, I was the first auditor of the Manitoba Gas and Electric Company, and the Winnipeg Electric Railway Company, which was controlled by the contractors who had built the lines to Prince Albert and Edmonton. It was that auditorship and the neglected charter of the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company which brought me to Toronto, ten years later, as third vice-president of the Canadian Northern, a railway which, though its name appears to be dead, will be alive, as railways live, I think, for evermore. CHAPTER VIII. _Recording the first encounter of Mackenzie and Mann, with mules for a stake._ It seems scarcely possible that the electric railway is only thirty years old. The marvel of Chicago, to a visitor less than thirty years ago, was the system of street cars moved by cables running between and beneath the rails. Winnipeg had a single track horse-car system, with passing sidings. It was the enterprise of Albert Austin, in these days president of the Consumers’ Gas Company of Toronto. The city gave a franchise to the Winnipeg Electric Railway Company, the creation of Mr. James Ross, of Montreal, Mr. William Mackenzie, who had recently come into control of the Toronto railway situation, and Mr. D. D. Mann. There was some confusion as to the Austin franchise’s priority of right. Indeed, Mr. Austin contended that the electric franchise was erroneously given. At all events, the electric cars started to run on the streets before the horse cars were run off the streets. We enjoyed the spectacle of Dobbin competing against the harnessed lightning, and the experience of a cut-rate business in fares, the like of which was never before, and has never since been seen. Rides were three cents each, and fifty tickets were sold for a dollar. Business institutions laid in stores of tickets, against the day when rates would rise. In the end, of course, the more modern method won out. The Winnipeg Electric Railway, which had its own difficulties, due to comparative scarcity of population, has come to earn a yearly revenue of over $3,500,000.