After nearly three years’ negotiation, the charter at thirty-eight thousand dollars seemed a good buy, and the prospect of financing construction pretty fair, largely because two factors in the situation were in a different case from what they had been when the idea of laying track into the Dauphin country began to be agreeable. The Manitoba Government was increasingly eager for better settlement in the Dauphin district, and the Northern Pacific had gone into a receivership. I am not sure that we don’t indirectly owe the National Railways to the incurable impetuosity of Joe Martin. As we have seen, he was attorney-general in the Greenway Government when it inherited the battle against the C.P.R. monopoly in 1888, and was the popular general of the battle of Fort Whyte. But he was not popular with his colleagues--very impetuous men seldom are. He resigned from the board of the Portage Electric Light and Power Company, at the height of an argument, and was surprised when he came to the next directors’ meeting to hear from President Watson that the resignation had been accepted. One evening he returned from Winnipeg to the Portage after telling Premier Greenway that he was through with his job. When he appeared at the office later to take up the broken threads of business, he found Mr. Attorney-General Sifton working coolly at his desk. Premier Greenway was a farmer, and not given to verbal rapiering. Otherwise, instead of allowing the fiery Joe to collide with a fait accompli, he might have emulated Lord North, who, when King George had at his request dismissed Charles James Fox not long before the signing of the American declaration of independence, wrote to Fox: “Sir,--His Majesty has thought proper to order a new Commission of the Treasury to be made out, in which I do not see your name.” Clifford Sifton was the subject of political prophecy from his first appearance in public life. He had come West from Middlesex as a boy of fourteen. His father had been Speaker of the Assembly. He chose Brandon as the first field for his legal talents, and quickly became solicitor of the town. As such he appeared at the private car of the Deputy Minister of the Interior, who was waited upon by the Town Council with a request for some improvement in their relationships with the great Department. The discussion fell naturally into the hands of the youngest man in the party, whom the deputy felt it his duty to snub somewhat obviously. Some years later the deputy saw this young man hang up his hat in the Minister of the Interior’s room in the Langevin Block. Unwritten history has it that the deputy found it expedient to become a full-fledged minister of the exterior after a reasonable period of meditation had elapsed. On memory’s tablets one does not read his name.