into kindlings has missed its mark and has struck a few miles down the
line. One of the hillsides moved a little in dreaming of the spring and
caught a passing freight train. Our cars grind cautiously by, for the
wrecking engine has only just come through. The deceased engine is
standing on its head in soft earth thirty or forty feet down the slide,
and two long cars loaded with shingles are dropped carelessly atop of
it. It looks so marvellously like a toy train flung aside by a child,
that one cannot realise what it means till a voice cries, 'Any one
killed?' The answer comes back, 'No; all jumped'; and you perceive with
a sense of personal insult that this slovenliness of the mountain is an
affair which may touch your own sacred self. In which case.... But the
train is out on a trestle, into a tunnel, and out on a trestle again. It
was here that every one began to despair of the line when it was under
construction, because there seemed to be no outlet. But a man came, as a
man always will, and put a descent thus and a curve in this manner, and
a trestle so; and behold, the line went on. It is in this place that we
heard the story of the Canadian Pacific Railway told as men tell a
many-times-repeated tale, with exaggerations and omissions, but an
imposing tale, none the less. In the beginning, when they would federate
the Dominion of Canada, it was British Columbia who saw objections to
coming in, and the Prime Minister of those days promised it for a bribe,
an iron band between tidewater and tidewater that should not break. Then
everybody laughed, which seems necessary to the health of most big
enterprises, and while they were laughing, things were being done. The
Canadian Pacific Railway was given a bit of a line here and a bit of a
line there and almost as much land as it wanted, and the laughter was
still going on when the last spike was driven between east and west, at
the very place where the drunken man sprawled behind the engine, and the
iron band ran from tideway to tideway as the Premier said, and people in
England said 'How interesting,' and proceeded to talk about the 'bloated