263 Sport and Life. 



hundreds of pounds. This dignitary's time is worth more than 

 that of the Premier, Finance Minister, and President of the Privy 

 Council of British Columbia put together, and the personal 

 interview you have at last obtained with him in his luxurious 

 office in distant Montreal, is necessarily of the briefest. For though 

 he receives you in his shirt sleeves, lounging back in his swing 

 armchair with a cigar in his mouth and his hat on his head, the 

 fact that half a dozen shorthand clerks and typewriters, seated 

 at the back of the gigantic writing desk, are awaiting their 

 chief's dictation, indicates what a busy man you have before 

 you. 



All freight handled by railways in America is classified in ten or 

 twelve classes, light and bulky articles paying ten times as much as 

 castings or other heavy things. You state your case as briefly as 

 you can ; you want a certain number of cars from Brantford, in 

 Ontario, to Golden, on the Columbia, a matter of fifteen hundred 

 miles or so. The principal articles you want to send are the 

 aforesaid sawmill machinery, the goods for the store, and some 

 heavy draught-horses trained to haul logs. The point you desire 

 to have conceded is to get machinery rate for the whole lot ; but a 

 brief glance at the list of goods you hand to the railway magnate 

 settles the matter; you have to pay "2. Class mixed car-load rates," 

 i.e., pay for the machinery the high rate, or ship one whole car-load 

 of each article, which in this case would have meant a dozen trains. 

 The plausible arguments you have prepared for the occasion to 

 convince the official that, as the sawmill and the store are pioneers 

 of their kind in the vast Kootenay country, and hence should 

 receive encouragement from the railway company, are, somehow, 

 left unsaid, for you instinctively feel that the magnate's reply 

 will be a cynical inquiry whether you think that the Canadian Pacific 

 Railway is being run for the health of British Columbia pioneers ! 

 It needed not to remember the old, and I believe quite true, story 

 told of the Canadian Pacific Railway autocrat's facetiousness to 

 convince one that the " Damn the public and God bless the Canadian 

 Pacific Railway " principle of doing business was not one from 



