George Shaw comes of a political family established in the county of Lanark during the building of the Rideau Canal, as a military expedient against possible unpleasant sequelæ to the war of 1812. His grandfather sat in the Parliament of the province of Upper Canada, twenty years before Confederation. His father was a keen politician at Smith’s Falls; and would have had his boys maintain the family tradition. He tells a political and a railway story about a farmer at Merrickville, whom we will call McWhilt. Young Shaw was made a scrutineer for an election. In Lanark every vote was as identifiable as its caster, and the scrutineer checked off the lists furnished him as the electors declared their preference--the ballot had not yet been adopted. Shaw senior came in late in the afternoon, looked over the polling record, and found that McWhilt had not voted. “Send for him,” was the order: “He’s promised to vote for Haggart.” McWhilt was sent for and voted for Gould, the Liberal. When Shaw, senior, heard the news he was too astounded to say more than “I’ll make him pay that note to-morrow.” One snowy night the engineer of a train between Merrickville and Smith’s Falls thought he bumped something at a crossing; but saw nothing to make him stop the train. Arrived at Smith’s Falls he looked around for signs of an accident, and found them. On the cowcatcher was the box of a bobsleigh, with McWhilt fast asleep in it, so much repose may conviviality induce. At eighteen years of age, with the profession of civil engineer as his objective, George Shaw was appointed to a party that was to survey Indian reserves in Rupert’s Land. Chicago and St. Paul furnished the way in; and the steamer International down the Red, from several miles north of Grand Forks, completed the last stage to Winnipeg. Shaw was one of a small proportion of first-class passengers. The berth was of child-like dimensions. For washroom in the morning he was directed to the bow, where stood a bowl, stool, with a bucket and rope alongside. The passenger let down his bucket into the river, drew all the turbid water his fastidiousness could use, and made the best of a towel which had once been laundered. It was a fitting prelude to a Western career which was to have a great traffic-bearing intimacy with the whole of the empty sub-continent which the boy surveyor was to see--an era of transformation unexampled in Britannic history. The time was eight years after Riel was the President of the Provisional Government of Rupert’s Land, with a Council and Cabinet, and the future Lord Strathcona had helped a Convention to draw up a Bill of Rights for a Government which was heralded by the Fort Garry paper, the New Nation, with an editorial as redolent of revolution as anything that these latter times have produced. As a curiosity in Western political literature it is worth giving: