The Canadian Northern, with a thousand miles of track through the best sections of Manitoba, and with immigration beginning to reach the West in a volume not approached since the feverish period of the foolish land boom, had passed almost unobserved by the public, from a local to an interprovincial proposition as to territory; and to an international factor as to finance. Lloyd George, when he was merely the little Welsh attorney and had been the pro-Boer of the irresistible tongue, and was certain of an unwelcome inclusion in the next Liberal Cabinet, became accustomed to hearing his friends discuss the probabilities of his party leadership, some time. He comes from the Snowdon country, and knows the ascents to that highest peak in England and Wales, particularly the ridge near the summit which over there is called the Saddleback, but on this continent would be named the Razorback. He was not blind to the possibility of eminence which fascinated his friends, but used to say to them, “Oh, I don’t know; I haven’t crossed the Saddleback yet.” The Canadian Northern Saddleback was the old Dawson route between Rainy River and the Kaministiquia. To cross it was a feat which was all the more dramatic for its having to be performed in the London money market against extraordinary endeavours to make of the feat a fatality. What the C.P.R. regarded as a too daring invasion of its fiscal domain synchronized with an abstraction from its western force of our first general traffic officer, with duties entirely in the dual revenue department. Additions to mileage were coming like triplets and twins, and there was plenty to keep the superintendent busy in enlarging staff and equipment, and in general management. Somebody with thorough knowledge of traffic conditions and intimate experience of the West was required. We found him in George H. Shaw, assistant general freight agent of the C.P.R. Mr. Shaw and I remained colleagues for seventeen years, when he took his ease on a retiring allowance, the just criticism of which is that it might have been more commensurate with the extreme value of his service. It has been suggested before in these drafts on memory that things regarded as being entirely matter-of-course appear in their true perspective only when the mellowing hand of age rests upon them. You see men working at their appointed job, and the job seems all there is about them. But in the West, until yesterday, when you met a man up to the ears in prosaic detail, you never knew with what romantic aspect of the pre-historic age he was a living link. My old colleague is one of these; as any, who are lucky enough to go round the Mississauga course with him--for he has played himself into a second coltage--and can start him on a trail of reminiscence, will discover.