an, John," says a boy scout. "Wow!"

"Big--so big!" admires the Jap.

"Yah. Makes them big Macs. in the ranks look shrunk. Knows artillery,
too. Rifle--kick! got a great eye. Look at 'im right wheel!"

* * * * * *

Then on the 1920 side of the Wagnerian stage picture observe this same
giant, less baby pink, thinner in the face, clad in evening dress;
Inverness cape, crush hat, in the rotunda of the Ritz in Montreal,
beside an average athletic citizen similarly dressed; the superb
civilian--and his marionette.

"Er--I think the car's waiting, General."

"Oh, no. We'll walk. Only a block or two," booms the giant.

He crosses the rotunda in seven swift, great strides, while the
marionette trots to keep up. They are off to a function at McGill
University. The new President--to whom professors bow with frigid
politeness and ladies ogle in admiring awe, and university governors
stand about like a bodyguard as though to intimate,--

"Ridiculous? Not a bit of it. There's no other university President
like him. And what else could we do with him? The Government had
nothing to suit him; for politics he's never meant; for business never.
Geddes left us. We picked a greater man. Yes, it seems awkward, but
never mind. A year from now you will say--here was the man that made
McGill as famous in 1921 as Sir William Dawson, the world geologist,
made it in 1890."

Montreal that made a citizen of prodigious Van Horne had here a
character in a setting far more unusual. The eminent soldier as head
of a university. One of the last surprises of the war; almost as it
seemed then a joker in the pack; when men had to remember how this man
leaped from an almost bankrupt real estate office in Victoria to what
he was in Canada's Hundred Days.

Of all men who seemed to have been absolutely created by the war Currie
was the first. He enlisted for active service in 1914, and Hughes made
him brigade-commander at Valcartier. He was in the First Contingent
that swung out of the Gulf the day that Hughes stood on the rope
ladder, almost forgetting that he had shaken hands with Currie. He
went to France as Commander of the 2nd Infantry Brigade. Within two
months came St. Julien and the green gas when Currie held his part of
the stricken line from Thursday till Sunday.

"And on Sunday," said Max Aitken, eye-witness, "he had not abandoned
his trenches. There were none left. They had been obl