en this way, and fit for a ball-room of the
dryads. Down in the valley beside the great bridge, the divisional
engineer has built him a wide house of logs, with hospitable porches
and chimneys that suggest generous fireplaces. I covet his right,
title and ownership thereto. They say this engineer is seventy-eight
years old, but I don't believe it.

"Beyond all doubt he is," says one of the train officials; "believe me,
he has eaten up his teeth at the work of building roads, and he has a
heart of great goodness."

"A strong man, is he?" I ask.

"Why, I cannot say, only that he sticks to his work and takes the trail
with the best of them. The men say he is 'sun-ripened,' which I am
convinced means something praiseworthy, for every man is his friend."

The Canadian Northern Railway Company is running a line immediately
parallel to this of the Grand Trunk Pacific, and as I look out of my
window I can see the men at work on the rival road. They are the
primal ploughers of the land, these railway fellows, and can cut a
valley out of a hill, like it were the rip of a brutal blade. To my
thinking, this is an enterprise of high heart and bravery..... And
yet, as I watch them at work, heaping up a grade, they seem small to
me, and paltry, like dirty boys intent on nothing more serious than
mud-pies. In some places, they build through marshy dunes that are
coppery-brown and tawny-red. Walking in these places is like walking
upstairs all the way, or like treading in deep straw, forms of exercise
most certainly concomitant with heart disease and a hackney gait.
Westward they go and Westward, these uncouth moving pictures of the
landscape, that change well-nigh as quick as those on a canvas, but
always it is a picture of a grade, a new cut, a gridiron of ties, and
long, long trails of steel. I tell you, these trails are the
heartstrings of the North.

But you must not think that the only builders are the men. The horses,
mules and oxen help. Some folk there are who mislike the oxen, but
these are foolishly prejudiced and ill-informed. The ox, it is true,
has a tiresome straddling gait, and his brain is small in comparison
with the bulk of his head, but contrariwise he retains a stolid
reliability that keeps him at his job. Once inspanned, he has no
desire to kick over the traces or to explore foreign parts; he doesn't
bite his trace-mate, or engage in any of those little playful jinks so
strangely peculiar to nor