Mrs. Wilson proved to be a perfect interpreter, and as pretty as she was efficient. The coroner, seeing the ease with which she took in all that was said by the witnesses, remarked to himself that she must have been a school teacher, and wonderfully quick to pick up so much Galician, while she was teaching a little English. Afterwards Mrs. Wilson told the coroner that she was herself a Galician, and introduced him to her husband--the Scotchman who had tried to dam the Galician tide. The Canadianization of these people is a question into which one must not be tempted to stray. Having so largely entered into their labours we owe it to ourselves, at least, to understand something of what their contribution to the West, and therefore to the East, has been. They arrived with very little but the will to work, and the ability in handi-craftsmanship which is shown in their buildings, and the excellence of their gardens and farms. The women remained on the homesteads, tending the cows and hens and doing what they could in heavier work, while the men earned money in railway construction gangs, with which to buy cattle and gear. We had them for year after year, beginning with the line between Dauphin and Swan river. Without them the settlement of many of the best sections of the West would have been retarded. Their names were no doubt written accurately in the payrolls; but pronunciation of them was not easy to engineers who had received only a Toronto University education. To save time and prevent complications each man was given a number. When the Galician constructionist presented himself at the paymaster’s tent, he was required to say, besides his number, the name of the boss he worked under--not always an easy thing, for even our names are not all as simple as our characters. For all the Canadian Northern life, our chief tracklayer was Joe Work--truly a prince at his job. His only blemish was an absent eye. It often happened that when a Galician came for his pay and was asked for whom he worked he would shut an eye, and smile. While we were doing our best to develop the Dauphin country, during the first year of operation, the line was extended to Winnipegosis. We had no access to Winnipeg; but this did not prevent our proprietors from buying the charter for a railway east of Winnipeg--the Manitoba and South Eastern. Once more, I think, there was no clear conception of the extensions that were to follow. But there was the urge to the place whence they go down to the sea in ships. At the end of our second season--1898--we opened the first section of the line to Lake Superior--forty-five miles from St. Boniface to Marchand, in the bush, west of the Lake of the Woods, the first time table of which, typewritten for economy’s sake, also hangs in my Toronto office.