attorneyships, burrowing into hydro-electric affairs for Toronto until
he becomes Dominion Railway Commission chairman--seven years at
that--and at last steps out into the full glare of undramatic notoriety
by taking office as Minister of Finance in 1919.

Well, in that capacity he has rubber-stamped millions of people in the
region of their pockets whom he would have missed altogether had he
been taking his maiden aunt to the picture galleries between detective
cases. Besides, he has three or four children, and I'm sure that when
some lady writes the cinema of his life she will portray him as a
hugely devoted papa with perfect young geniuses of children who yearn
to spend papa's money upon the very luxuries against which he is
warning the parents of other young people.

Once,--it was something to do with Niagara power--I heard Mr. Drayton
weaving a dull dry web of apparently trivial evidence about some very
important people. It seems to me that one William Mackenzie was a
particular object; if not he should have been. Once you admit that
Drayton belongs to corporation instead of criminal law--though
sometimes there's precious little difference--Mackenzie and Adam Beck
are just the sort of audacious public-interest performers that a man
like him should be after. He seemed to have an insatiable capacity for
picking out little filaments of dry-as-dust technique from which on
behalf of an impersonal client like the city of Toronto he could manage
to inveigle a web of silk about any anti-civic despot who regards a
city as a thing to be worked for dividends, and people merely as common
economic dots and carry ones.

He impressed me then as a born Englishman. He had the neat, chiseled
accents and the imperturbable air of a perfect gentleman, with a touch
of nonchalance and the suggestion that if at the time of adjournment he
had just got to the up stroke of a small "i", he could leave it there
and come back to-morrow, beginning precisely where he had left off.
But he was not born in England; only educated there--which is
something. A few more of our public men would be the better for a
little Harrowing.

Once into public finance, Sir Henry does not propose to be a mere
reverberation of Sir Thomas White. Never have we had two such drastic
highwayman budgets as those which Drayton flung at the people in 1920
and 1921. From the tone of any supplementary remarks which he feels
like making in order to amuse us while