“Sure enough, Mackenzie didn’t pick the roans for his second choice, so that at least he didn’t figure them as better than the fifth pair. We took them as our third choice; and they proved to be the best team of all, as Mahoney had said. Mackenzie and I have been in a good many arrangements together since then; but I don’t think any of them gave me more genuine satisfaction than the one in which I took Dan Mahoney’s advice.” Sometimes books of reference err. “Canadian Men and Women of the Time” is nodding when it states that the Mackenzie-Mann partnership began in 1886. The slip is similar to another in connection with Sir Joseph Flavelle, of whom it is said mistakenly, that he was “long in the dry goods business in Lindsay, Ontario, with his brother, John D. Flavelle.” In 1886 Mackenzie was building snow sheds in the Selkirks; and Mann was fulfilling a twenty-five-mile grading contract on the Manitoba North Western. It was while he was busy with this that I first saw him, in the office of my chief, W. A. Baker, at Portage la Prairie. At that time D. D. Mann was thirty-three years old, very big, and a bachelor; and I wondered who the heavy, slow-moving man was. The Mackenzie-Mann partnership began in 1888, but it was part of a quartet, and not a duet. The other partners were the late James Ross and the present Sir Herbert Holt of Montreal. The firm took contracts on the Coboconk and Credit Valley lines, and undertook the whole of the C.P.R. short line through Maine to St. John. The Regina and Long Lake, the Calgary and Edmonton, and the line from Calgary to Fort MacLeod followed, between 1889 and 1891. Then constructive energy in the West seemed exhausted. The railway contracting of Mackenzie and Mann entered a state of suspended animation. There is a tradition among his friends that when Mackenzie saw the finish of these contracts in the West he made up his mind to retire on his competence, and devote himself to farming at his native Kirkfield, and to public service in Victoria county. Sir Sam Hughes used to tell, with as much relish as Sir Donald tells of the contest over the mules, how he beat Mackenzie for the Conservative nomination for Victoria and Haliburton in 1891. But life’s strenuous endeavour was not over for Sir William Mackenzie in his early forties. Unexpectedly he became connected with the modernization of the street railway in Toronto--the beginning of nearly thirty years of achievement such as has not been approached in Canada by any native son. From a commitment to an electric railway in Toronto to a similar enterprise in Winnipeg was a natural development of a genius for courageous initiation, the range of which I do not think he himself recognized at that time.