r the duties of public
life.

The sensations of the cured scriptural blind man who saw "men as trees
walking" were repeated to Canadians of thirty-five years ago who read
about those legendary Scots, Yankees and Canadians who flung that _chemin
de fer_ over Canada to start a Confederacy into a nation. And there was
no _Boys' Own Annual_ in Canada to tell the tale, as it should have been
done, along with the tales of the Northwest Mounted Police and the
adventures of the Hudson's Bay Company. George Stephen, Donald A. Smith,
Robert Angus, Sandford Fleming, John A. Macdonald, Van Horne, the young
Shaughnessy--all seemed then to be not merely doers of the undoable, but
men of mighty imagination and a sort of Old Testament morality. Even the
Pacific Scandal seemed as necessary a part of the narrative as the story
of Joseph's coat and of Jacob and Esau were of the epic of Israel.

Well, admittedly, most of that has faded from the Canadian Pacific. We
read the annual address of the C.P.R. President with yawns. It all seems
considerably like what is said and done at any directors' meeting of a
rubber factory or a street railway. You read the names of the directors
and few of them strike you with any sense of novelty or of awe. The room
in which these magnates meet is--just a room; it used to be thought of as
a sort of Doges' Palace of finance. You may even note that one of the
directors is baggy at the knees, and any two of them may be talking along
the corridor about that very ordinary thing--the cost of living.

Of all the men at any C.P.R. directors' meeting, Lord Shaughnessy knows
most about the steep side of finance. He was the spender when there was
nothing to spend. The romantic adversities of those days never left him.
He came down to the presidency with the fear of no-funds in his soul.
From the beginning until then he had felt all the ragged edges of C.P.R.
life. He had grimly chuckled to Van Horne, the occasionally helpless
wizard, over the hard times. And hard times never really left the road
until Van Horne handed the C.P. over to Shaughnessy just at the edge of
the era when the system was getting ready to handle phenomenal traffic
arising out of stupendous immigration.

From then on till the day that he also went out was the epoch when
traffic and travel became vaster than the road, and greater than the men.
It was his to operate, and to build as well. But the operations were all
of a system which