After a year the whole top floor of the Toronto Railway Building was occupied by the railway constructors. To desk room here I came at the end of 1902, when it was decided that the Canadian Northern head office must be in Toronto and that somebody familiar with all the details of the operation of completed lines should carry a general responsibility. The title of superintendent was changed to that of third vice-president; and so continued for nearly sixteen years. In this reference to an office convenience some hyper-critic may discover solid confirmation of the suspicion which has occasionally been formed and fanned in sections of the press which often impugn motives, and seldom examine aspersions. The Canadian Northern, it has been professed, was created as the milch cow for a couple of railway contractors, was forced into an excessive flow of nourishment, and was turned over to the people of Canada after having been drained into an almost fatal exhaustion. When we come to discuss some financial aspects of the railway situation in Canada, this matter may be recurred to. Meantime, it is enough to say that there’s only a mare’s nest in it. The Canadian Northern did not long remain with desk accommodation on a friendly floor. Negotiations were concluding for the purchase of the building at the corner of King and Toronto streets. Early in 1903, as renters from the Rice Lewis estate, we began to take possession--a process that continued without cessation for all but twenty years. Always somebody was moving. Half the time it was a shift for a whole department, because another department as well as itself required more room. At the beginning, for instance, the legal department--but there was no legal department of the railway in the generally accepted sense. There was, of course, a great deal of legal business, much of it local in scope, and an increasing amount that was fundamental to the railway’s growth. Such questions as the acquisition of right of way in the West and the adjustment of damage claims were handled by our solicitors in Winnipeg. But important matters like the agreements covering acquisition of charter rights and the physical assets of existing companies, and the creation of new joint stock entities--when we came to require an express company of our own, for example--were dealt with in Toronto, first by Mr. Z. A. Lash alone, and later by a department of which he was the head.