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railway was driven in at Craigellachie on November 7, 1885, and the great road which Sir Edward Blake had described as a streak of rust across the wilderness" without earning power to grease a train's axle-wheels, had bound together half a continent.

It is almost impossible to speak with any degree of thoroughness of the work of the man who, with many goods laid up, yet seemed determined not to take his ease. After the railway had been opened hospitals had to be built and colleges had to be founded. The once lonely fur trader was always busy in a throng of men. In 1897 we find him raised to the peerage with the title of Lord Strathcona, and on the outbreak of the South African War Strathcona's Horse, raised and financed by him and largely recruited from that splendid body, the Canadian Mounted Police, which he himself had been instrumental in raising, brought Canadians and Englishmen together in a way that perhaps only those who fight side by side can understand. The magnificence of Lord Strathcona's gift cannot be reckoned by dollars-the battlefields of South Africa are where the price of this great gift was paid. In 1896 he was made Lord High Commissioner of Canada, but the high-sounding title always seems to those who knew him to suggest but little of the man whom they remember. Rather, a memory of Lord Strathcona recalls a vision of an old man, a little deaf and with curiously gentle manners, sitting and working in a plain office

room.

It was his simplicity of life and of thought which endeared him to his fellow-men, and his old friends love to recall the fact that even in the matter of taking precedence it was very difficult indeed to persuade him to "stand in the order of his going "; while

one of them recalls a characteristic story of him in connection with old days at Winnipeg. With his usual hospitality Lord Strathcona had invited far too large a party to dine and stay the night at his house at Silverheights. In his perplexity, and suddenly realising that some dozen friends at least would be without sleeping accommodation and that the dinner provided might also be inadequate, he transferred the feast to the Club House at Winnipeg, where an excellent entertainment and fine old Hudson Bay port beguiled the party for a considerable time. Lord Strathcona meanwhile was busy at the telephone ordering extra beds to be taken out to Silverheights, and when the company arrived there in the evening he was able to give them all accommodation.

His old friend who told me the story was obliged to leave early the following morning, and passing through the hall at 6 a.m. he found his host sleeping peacefully in a straight-backed wooden chair. In his preparations for his guests he had overlooked

one man.

"It was so like Donald Smith," said his old friend," to remember everybody except himself."

Chapter VI

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Sir William van Horne

S the months of the war have lengthened out many of us must have noticed, as we have added up our heavy losses, that it is not war only which has deprived us of friends. Side by side with lists of casualties there has been a very long list of deaths at home, while the obituary notices of newspapers have been busy with the names of many who have not lived to see the end of a great struggle. This can hardly be a coincidence. It points rather to the fact that in spite of our fortitude, in spite of the courage that has been shown by men and women, and in spite of their steadfastness and patience, the war has proved a very heavy strain on those who have hearts to weep and minds to feel. The sheer bodily fatigue of extra work has gone very hardly with many of those who were of an age when it seemed not idleness to put their tools aside; while the mental tension, the uncertainties of war, the very absence of news, has often broken down the health of the man or the woman who is outwardly showing a calm and sanguine spirit. Outside the ranks, many splendid fighters have fallen, and amongst them there lies the figure of one who in his lifetime was one of the giants, and whom we pause to honour now, not with words only but by showing if possible in a sketch, however crude and faulty, some aspects of one of the greatest intellects and most powerful personalities of his day.

A story is current in Canada to the intent that a stalwart miner out West, being impressed as everyone was by the extraordinary amount of work which Sir William van Horne habitually accomplished, once said that he would do in one day exactly and hour by hour what Sir William was doing in order to see how he got through his work. At the end of the day he was carried to his bed and remained there for some weeks afterwards in a state of collapse.

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If work means success-and certainly there is no surer road to it-the success of Sir William van Horne was ensured and preordained from the very first. It is not too much to say that he was a man of colossal industry. Sleep," he said once, is a habit, and it is rather a bad habit, like eating." During pressure of work it used to be quite a usual thing for him to give up all sleep for many nights, and yet it would be giving a wrong impression of him to say that his energy was indomitable. Rather his leisure was indomitable. He had time for everything; no one was ever less pressed or hurried. He had time for art, which-had he devoted all his energies to it would have probably made him twice famous. And he had time for building houses, and for farming in a manner that was as successful as it was original. And he had time for building railways, and for seeing his friends, and for making one of the most remarkable collections of art that has ever been placed under one roof. And all the time he was laughing at industry and pretending he knew nothing about it.

"We are all born lazy," he said one day. "Some of us get impressions, vivid impressions, which call for our industry; industry leads to facility, and everything becomes easy.'

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"Work! I never work. I never have worked

since I was ten years old and split logs. I have only enjoyed."

Yet this was a man who built a railway from one ocean to another in Canada, and from one end of an island to the other in Cuba. He never worked; he only enjoyed himself! The radiant philosophy of such a life, and the sheer success of it, seems to make endeavour at once easier and finer.

Sir William made no trumpet call to work, to suffer, or to endure. But he gained a height, and from there he called down to men struggling below that it was great fun up on the top, and great fun getting there, and that it was all perfectly easy!

Nothing ever seemed to be a matter of difficulty with him, and we well remember hearing him say one day, when talking over some of his achievements, that in order to succeed he had never taken as much physical exercise as it takes a young man to play a game of baseball, and he had never taken so much mental exercise as it takes to play a good game of bridge.

A masterly facility in everything he attempted was far the most striking thing about him, and always out of what one might call his most serious success he got the full enjoyment of a schoolboy. Even in describing his early and very poor days, one never heard him allude to them as his early struggles. He gave us anecdotes about them, made us laugh with him over them, and told us stories of giant difficulties only to make fun of them. Always he gave the happy idea, not only that difficulties were made to be overcome, but that they were made to be enjoyed. No one who has ever heard him talk at his own table in Montreal will readily forget the presence of the man who dominated the assembly by the sheer force of his personality and held a

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