gazine after getting out the first number.

"I'm too irritable to get along with anybody in an office," he
declared. "I know I'm impatient and all that, boys. You'd better send
for McKenzie to come in from Brandon and edit the paper."

This suggestion of his editorial successor seemed to the others to be a
good one; for Roderick McKenzie had been Secretary of the Manitoba
Grain Growers' Association from the first and had been a prime mover in
its activities as well as wielding considerable influence in the other
two prairie provinces where he was well known and appreciated. He was
well posted, McKenzie.

So the Vice-President wired him to come down to Winnipeg at once.

Yes, he was well posted in the farming business, Rod. McKenzie. He had
learned it in the timber country before he took to it in the land of
long grass. At eleven years of age he was plowing with a yoke of oxen
on the stump lands of Huron, helping his father to scratch a living out
of the bush farm for a family of nine and between whiles attending a
little log schoolhouse, going on cedar-gum expeditions, getting lost in
the bush and indulging in other pioneer pastimes.

Along in 1877, when people were talking a lot about Dakota as a farming
country, McKenzie took a notion to go West; but he preferred to stay
under the British flag and Winnipeg was his objective. A friend of his
was running a flour-mill at Gladstone (then called Palestine),
Manitoba, and young McKenzie decided to take a little walk out that way
to visit him. It was a wade, rather than a walk! It was the year the
country was flooded and during the first thirty days after his arrival
he could count only three consecutive days without rain. In places the
water was up to his hips and when he reached the flour-mill there was
four feet of water inside of it.

Such conditions were abnormal, of course, and due to lack of settlement
and drainage. After helping to build the first railway through the
country Roderick McKenzie eventually located his farm near Brandon and
so far as the rich land and the climate were concerned he was entirely
satisfied.

Not so with the early marketing of his grain, though. He disposed of
two loads of wheat at one of the elevators in Brandon one day and was
given a grade and price which he considered fair enough. When he came
in with two more loads of the same kind of wheat next day, however, the
elevator man told him that he had sent a sample to Winn