They said, unanswerably, that Governments change in party and personnel; that the construction of a line in the Dauphin country was not an assuredly profitable undertaking; and that it was better, instead of relying too much on political fortune, that the builders of the line should be vitally concerned in its prosperity. So, in the end, the guarantee was fixed at eight thousand dollars per mile, for a hundred and twenty-five miles, with freedom from interest liability for the company during two years after the completion of construction. Under these terms with the Manitoba Government, in the spring of 1896, the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company began construction from Gladstone, on the Manitoba North Western, thirty-six-miles from Portage, to Lake Winnipegosis. I was made the first superintendent of the infant, and on the fifteenth of December, 1896, we began operation, and issued our first time-table on January 1, 1897, a copy of which hangs in my office in the Dominion Bank Building, Toronto. It began for me, indeed, a long avoidance of calm repose. CHAPTER IX. _Beginning the story of the Canadian Northern as a pioneer line with a staff of thirteen._ A merciful Providence, which keeps us from seeing far ahead, gave to none of the men concerned in operating the first commercial train that ran upon what was to become the Canadian Northern System, the faintest idea of what was ahead. We should have invited the Tempter to take a back seat, no doubt, if we had heard, on the fifteenth of December, 1896, when one of our two engines pulled out of Gladstone for Dauphin on the rails of the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company, that, ten years from that night we should be celebrating publicly the opening of a railway from Toronto to Parry Sound, and privately the taking over, while the speeches at the Board of Trade banquet in the King Edward, were being made, of two hundred and fifty miles of the Regina-Prince Albert line from the Canadian Pacific; that our total mileage would then be over thirty-five hundred; and that, after another ten years, there would be in operation under our control nine thousand five hundred miles of railway.