326 Sport and Life. 



receipt of one cent (halfpenny). I had in the meanwhile gone 

 to London, and immediately sent the cent stamp in a registered 

 letter to Ottawa. The following is the verbatim copy of the 

 official letter I received in reply : 



Dead Letter Office, Ottawa. 



Mr. W. A. Baillie Grohman, &c., England. 



The letter to the address of 



Mr. Baillie Grohman, &c., 



New York, 



Which was held at the Dead Letter Office for deficient postage, was 

 kept for one month, and not having been claimed was disposed of 

 in the usual manner. This letter not having been registered, no record 

 of its disposal has been kept. The one cent postage remitted is 

 therefore returned herewith. 



J. WALSH, Superintendent. 



My letter with its contents had been destroyed " in the usual 

 manner!" This is the most charitable conclusion one could put 

 on this singular proceeding. There were some other important 

 documents connected with my case, and these, oddly enough, 

 disappeared too, when some months subsequent to my having 

 won the first step in the Supreme Court, my lawyer thought proper 

 to abscond from Victoria and British Columbia, to the ruin of 

 more than one of his clients and to the upsetting of my chances to 

 succeed in the courts. Stock Exchange men will tell you that 

 the great secret of not going to the wall is to know when to " cut 

 one's losses." I thought that moment had arrived for me, and so 

 I " closed the account," and soon afterwards bade good-bye to 

 the picturesque land of unfulfilled promises. 



A word must still be said about the fate of that large block of 

 splendid agricultural land in Lower Kootenay covered by my 

 concession. These 48,000 acres I had proposed, as the reader will 

 remember, to reclaim from the annual summer overflow by turning 

 the Kootenay river. When that intention had to be abandoned, an 

 equally effectual cure presented itself. It was to widen and deepen 

 the only outlet of Kootenay lake. By so doing an increased outflow 



