far as can be reasonably surmised, thinking about the tariff and the
waters of the Red Sea that swallowed up Pharaoh. It may be a
coincidence, but it seems like fate, that he was born in the same year
as the National Policy; the indignity of which was so great that he
vowed to spend his life living it down. He went to sleep with blue
books and the Bible under his pillow. He gave way to both. He has
never gone back on either. The iniquity of a tariff to him was part of
the moral law. The more he exhorted at revival meetings and
local-preached and led class-meetings, the more deeply he was convinced
that tariff-Tories are in constant need of economic salvation. At
threshing bees I can fancy this broad-faced, dreamy-eyed, large-mouthed
young "Reformer" who never was born to take life mentally easy, saying
to himself as he shoved the stack straw past his boots, that the old
boys talking so hard about elections knew nothing about economics; and
he wished to heaven that barn was all threshed out, so that he could
get back home to read some more tariff statistics.

The Drury farm, hewn from the bush by his grandfather, cost the young
man nothing but taxes and upkeep. It gave him leisure in which to
study the ills of farming. What a blessing all farmers have not
leisure! Travelling up and down that peninsula between Huron and Erie,
constantly at some sort of "Meeting," Drury could see "Hard Times" on
almost every telegraph pole. The average farmer had a small lot, a
heavy mortgage and a large family; scrub cattle, thin horses and poor
hogs. No doubt Drury read, when it came out, that amazing pamphlet of
Goldwin Smith--Canada and the Canadian Question, in which the writer
alleged that the Canadian farmer sold the best he produced and ate the
culls. Well, with hogs at $3 per cwt., oats 20 cents a bushel, hay $7
a ton, and wheat under a dollar, from stumpy little fields--the farmer
in Drury's youth did well to escape cannibalism.

To know Drury, one must understand the oddly interesting epoch and
region in which he came up. The men with whose sons he went to the
village school were manufacturers first, farmers second. Their raw
material was the hardwood bush; their factory the saw mill; their
common carrier the Yankee schooner. In my own bush days a few counties
further down in that same peninsula, I recall heaps of white oak slabs
in the forest which I was told were the remains of the timber-men who
had gone th