THE LUMBER KING
Newly arrived in Ottawa one afternoon last summer, I was standing amid
its noble buildings, chatting with a fat policeman; and the fat
policeman, having identified me as a visitor from England, said I must
certainly call on his friend J. R. Booth. My comment was directed to the
necessity for an introduction and an appointment, whereupon a puzzled
face revealed the friendly constable as wondering what I was talking
about. Thus this incident epitomised the great difference between two
peoples, otherwise identical, who are divided by three thousand miles of
ocean.
I am British, and, consequently, a snob; the fat policeman was Canadian,
and, therefore, unhampered by any sense of social distinctions. It would
never occur to a fat policeman in the Old Country that he was
everybody’s equal. If he happened to know a millionaire, he would talk
of that person with awe, instead of with affectionate respect, as was
the note sounded in my corpulent companion’s references to J. R. Booth.
The untravelled English reader may find a difficulty in realising that
it is not a natural law, by Providence ordained, which divides humanity
into ladies and gentlemen on the one hand, and common people on the
other. In this dear old country many excellent folk would be shocked at
the idea of dining at the same table, or praying in the same pew, with a
man who does useful manual work; but the people of Canada, while very
much alive to the power of the dollar, are blind and deaf to the idea
that personal wealth has anything to do with personal worth. The fact is
that kid gloves and the silk hat are emblematical of a country that has
reached a ripe, not to say rotten, stage of development. In a new and
progressive country like Canada muscle commands, not emolument alone,
but honour.
From the terrace of the Ottawa Parliament House—that majestic Gothic
pile which crowns the architectural beauty of the capital—I looked out
upon a far sweep of beautiful Canadian scenery. Down below, in the
foreground of that living panorama, the eye noted, on the farther shore
of the broad stretch of glistening river, a little town of workshops and
factories clustering behind the white smudge that marked a waterfall. I
was looking at the head-quarters of the industry out of which the city
of Ottawa has grown. I was looking at the largest lumber-mill in the
world. I was looking at a part of the property created, owned, and
controlled by J. R. Booth, the friend of the fat policeman.
During my tour of the Dominion’s great cities—so full of light, racing
tramcars, human enthusiasm, and other forms of electricity—Canada
became typified in my mind as The Man Without a Waistcoat; for the
energetic citizen permits himself that toilet modification during the
brilliant summer months. But an abstract personification was destined to
be superseded in my thoughts by a definite human example. In J. R. Booth
I felt that I had met the spirit and genius of Canada in the flesh.
I went to him under the conditions which had the sanction of national
usage—that is to say, I went without introduction or appointment.
An old man, thick-set and of medium height, with white beard and
clean-shaven upper lip; an old man in a suit of dark grey homespun, with
peaked cap to match; an old man standing by himself, thinking, in the
lee of a wooden shed—that was the multi-millionaire as I happened to
find him. It is not many persons who have found him thus.
A while ago Sir Robert Perks dropped in from the Old Country to discuss
high finance with the Lumber King of Canada. Sir Robert was shown into
an office, where he presently was much astonished by the entrance of an
elderly individual in overalls, sprinkled with red dust and mortar. The
old man on that occasion had been laying bricks. Visitors sometimes find
him at the bottom of an excavation showing his men how to lay concrete.
There was someone with me who, when we saw him standing beside the
wooden building, said that was J. R. Booth. I should not have known. At
a casual glance he might, even in Canada, have been anybody; in England
he could easily have been mistaken for nobody. But when I stepped
forward and spoke to that upright, impassive old man, when I confronted
his calm, strong countenance, with its wise, blue, penetrating eyes, I
realised the presence of J. R. Booth. I cannot find the right word to
reflect the impression he produces. The strength of simplicity; the oak
pillar or marble column unadorned; a man content to lean on mind instead
of manner—those are but imperfect suggestions.
I asked if I might go over his works, and he said “Yes.” I asked if I
could have a chat with him afterwards, and again he said “Yes.” For he
is a straightforward Aye-and-Nay talker—there is no polite pretending,
no verbal embroidery, with J. R. Booth. He struck me as being the rare
human marvel—a genius without vanity.
Genius is not an exaggerated definition. J. R. Booth gave the first
clues to his future career at an early age by doing something that his
relatives considered silly and something else that they considered
insane. I should mention he came of a stock of seven brothers Booth who,
over a century ago, emigrated from Ireland to Waterloo—a district
within that vast stretch of Quebec territory known as the Eastern
Townships. There they toiled, prospered, and multiplied; and it came to
pass that J. R. Booth, of the rising generation, had to plough, chop
wood, and tend stock. But homestead duties did not monopolise the young
man’s attention. It was in his mind that the utmost power of a man’s
body can accomplish but a minute fraction of the work waiting to be done
in the world; and, undeterred by the titters of his intimates, he put in
a lot of private time constructing amateur watermills on a rivulet that
coursed through the paternal property. Those wheels were running in his
mind when, at the age of twenty-one, he broke away from the traditions
of his youth, and, with no more than nine dollars in his pocket, set
forth to conquer the world in his own way, the good people of Waterloo
shaking their heads over the departure of one whom they feared must be
crazy.
We may jump a few years spent bridge-building in the States, and so come
to the time, fifty-eight years ago, when J. R. Booth, a carpenter
without capital, stood on the banks of the River Ottawa, bending an
appreciative eye on the Chaudière Falls. There they were, rushing and
roaring—a mighty volume of sustained force running to waste. J. R.
Booth decided that they were what he was looking for.
Lower rungs of the ladder were quickly mounted—from factory hand to
foreman, from foreman to tenant of a mill, from tenant to owner. A bank
was willing to back such a man; and at a public auction J. R. Booth
bought, for £9,000, a large territory endowed with timber wealth
which—as he had taken the precaution to ascertain—was almost
incalculable. Local lumbermen regarded the transaction as hopelessly
vast and audacious. But with J. R. Booth it was just a beginning.
From having water-wheels on the brain, he now had them on the Ottawa,
where they propelled powerful machinery that hauled and sliced his logs.
The reader will not, of course, confound this time-honoured water-power,
as used at the place of its occurrence, with modern “white coal,” which
is water-power in a fluid, invisible form that lends itself to
distribution. J. R. Booth had not introduced a new method. He merely
introduced an old method into a new place. By the one plan you must
bring your factory to the waterfall; by the other plan you send the
waterfall, along a metal cable, to the factory.
If the Chaudière cataract illustrates the latent resources of Canada, J.
R. Booth illustrates the qualities that go to make good Canadians—those
men with daring imaginations, industrious brains and educated hands. But
he is not the type—he is a supreme example. It is as though Nature had
prepared a store of business capacity sufficient for a townful of
merchants, and then, on second thoughts, had bestowed it all on one man.
So fully did J. R. Booth post himself on the practical details of
logging and lumbering, so securely did he lay the foundations of every
fresh extension of his enterprise, that, of all the forest properties in
the world, his became the largest. Mr. Paul E. Bilkey put the case
comprehensively when he wrote: “Rivers, streams big and little,
snow-covered forest tracks, roads that are good and roads that are bad
and roads that are no roads at all, lead ultimately to the coffers of J.
R. Booth; veins and arteries stretching over two great provinces and an
American State, parts of or tributaries to a great industrial system
whose heart pulsates day and night at the Chaudière, to the uttermost
agency devised and dominated by the genius of one man—Booth.” And
again: “The river is bitted and broken to do the work that Booth
requires it to do: turns the wheels of his mills, takes the logs and
timbers down through his slides, floats his noisy tugs and carries his
booms; and Booth, to keep it all going, draws upon a timber empire in
the north which, if strung out in a line a mile wide, would stretch from
Quebec to Victoria.”
Thus to measure the scope of this colossal enterprise your imagination
must first roam over large areas of Ontario and Quebec, and then (J. R.
Booth having felt cramped in a little place like Canada) take cognisance
of great slices of the United States. But it is easier to find the
limits of the business than of the brain that controls it. Of that
brain, the more obvious feature is its organising power. For J. R. Booth
is the sole and actual head of the vast concern. It is not run by a
syndicate or a company. He easily and successfully carries a burden of
mental responsibility, and exercises a volume of mental control, that
would suffice to keep half a dozen boards of directors out of mischief.
But the most remarkable feature of this brain, I think, is its capacity
for detail. It is not only a mental telescope that sees things too large
for ordinary vision; it is a mental microscope that detects minutiæ
invisible to most men. I will give two illustrations.
A certain amount of carting having to be done, there are some five
hundred horses at the Booth lumber yards, and, one of them recently
dying suddenly overnight, it was replaced within an hour or so by the
responsible foreman. “Where did the new horse come from?” asked the
eagle-eyed old man next morning, soon after arriving on the scene at
seven o’clock, as is his daily custom. The other incident occurred one
afternoon, when many hundreds of the hands were streaming homeward on
the conclusion of their day’s work. The old man, standing by, called to
one of the men by name. Said the venerable employer: “Are you satisfied
with your wages?” “Yes,” was the reply. “Then why do you steal my
property?” came the further inquiry. At first the man made faltering
protestations of innocence, but when requested to raise the lid of his
dinner-can—which, indeed, proved full of copper nails—he confessed his
fault in an extremity of penitence and dismay. The old man—who, by the
way, associated a reprimand and a warning with forgiveness—had not been
blind to the fact that a dinner-can swings in one way if empty (which is
its normal state at four o’clock in the afternoon), and in another way
if it be full of metal.
[Illustration: PUMPKINS GROWN IN QUEBEC PROVINCE (_see page 42_)]
And all this time I have been speaking of J. R. Booth merely in his
capacity of Lumber King. He is other things as well. For example, he has
long been a wood-pulp magnate. You get a tree, and pound it into a fibry
mass which, with added water, resembles thick oatmeal porridge; and when
you have spread that mess out and let it partly dry, it rolls up like a
thick, coarse blanket, in which form you can ship it across the ocean to
be the basis of the great reels of paper that feed the daily Press. The
old man acquired the necessary knowledge and machinery for doing that
class of business, and he does it on a grand scale.
Thus on my conducted tour of inspection there was much to see. First, I
beheld a stretch of river where the water was hidden by wood—logs
floating end to end and side by side, giving a ribbed surface to the
vista, which suggested acres of a Brobdingnagian corduroy. They look
flat and tame—those trees without roots or leaves or branches. Here one
saw the forest suspended midway between the poles of its destiny—no
longer an asylum for birds and beasts, nor yet house and furniture for
man.
I knew something of the stages through which that floating timber had
passed. For I have penetrated into Canada’s lofty jungle and visited the
camps where companies of sturdy men fell the trees and saw them into
logs, and haul those logs to the nearest river, along which they are
borne by the current or drawn by tugs, until at last they join the dense
congregation of their fellows massed within sight of the mill.
I now saw the places where, one by one, the logs were pushed within
reach of mechanism that lifted them out of the water and bore them up an
incline, thence to be delivered into the maw of complex, ingenious,
deafening, ruthless machinery. You had some inkling of the force of the
Chaudière Falls when you saw what that force was doing. Metal platforms
went racing airily about with huge logs as though they were
featherweights. Sometimes a great blundering log would roll off the
platform, whereat a devilish iron arm arose out of the floor and pushed
all that timber tonnage back into position. Always the heavily burdened
platform was running forward; and, looking ahead, you saw an obstruction
along the route—an obstruction of whirling, shrieking machinery. Still
looking, you saw the logs, without any jarring or delay, melt
miraculously through the obstruction as if they were no more substantial
than cloud. And on the other side they were logs no longer, but merely
clusters of planks—circular saws having sliced them like so much
cheese.
In those vast chambers of clean, quick mechanism—fed at one end with
tree-trunks, and elsewhere belching forth streams of boards, beams,
laths, and shingles, with avalanches of chips and cascades of
sawdust—in those vast chambers, I say, one’s ears are put out of
service by the shrieking din, and the visitor has the more occasion for
his eyes. He must walk circumspectly, lest peradventure he be hurled
hence by an iron arm, and cut with swift precision into thin, wet
slices.
From the lumber mills I passed into regions where J. R. Booth makes wood
pulp. My guide began by introducing me to a grinder—a huge affair that
swallows six tons of logs a day and files them to fibre. Twenty-two of
these grinders were growling away at their mammoth meals, and there were
others, I learnt, in process of construction. It was certainly a case of
lost identity with the thick, grey stuff that went flowing on to the
screens. That it had once been the solid part of a forest was a thought
as unthinkable as that little boys would soon be running about with it
in distant cities, shouting “’Orrible murder! Lytest special!”
The screens are discriminating. The bulk of the fibre passes through a
one-hundredth-of-an-inch aperture, and is good for paper. Then the
residue runs on a screen having apertures of about a sixtieth of an
inch; and while that which penetrates the interstices is available for
fine cardboard, that which remains above is suitable for coarse
cardboard. Now the several streams of porridge are pumped upstairs to
wet-presses that contain revolving cylinders. You next see the stuff
clinging to a hurrying felt band that transfers it to wooden rollers.
When several thicknesses have wound round a roller, they are cut with a
pointed stick, removed, and folded; and there you have your mechanical
ground pulp, which is nothing but washed wood fibre loosely matted by
water. That mechanical ground pulp constitutes about three-fourths, in
bulk, of paper used by the daily and weekly Press. I was conducted to
the range of buildings where J. R. Booth makes the constituent which,
with certain small accessories, completes the substance of our
news-sheets. Again logs are the raw material. But this time they are not
ground. They are first despoiled of their bark by one piece of
mechanism; then by another piece of mechanism they are cut into chips.
It seems ungracious to criticise a machine; but I observed that the
“chipper” is apt to be a little remiss. Some of the chips it turns out
are rather larger than J. R. Booth requires them to be. So all are
subjected to a screening test, those of excessive size being dealt with
in an auxiliary apparatus called a “re-chipper.” The little nuggets of
wood are now sent upstairs in a carrier, and shot into big bins, each of
which holds nearly two hundred tons. Thence they pass through funnels
into great steel digesters, in which they are packed down close with
long iron rods. The digesters have an acid-proof lining of bricks and
cement; and, to be informed of the reason for this, I was taken
downstairs again. We visited a part of the premises which, by reason of
certain fumes, suggested “Paradise Lost.” I am not a chemist, and I
cannot describe what the agents of J. R. Booth were doing with their
immense supplies of lime and sulphur. It must suffice to say that they
produced sulphurous acid and a horrid smell.
The former is conveyed to the upper story, and pumped into the
digesters, previously packed with chips. “Digester” is the technical and
literal description, for the acid-saturated wood is now cooked with
steam for ten or twelve hours, at the end of which time it is reduced to
white fluff. After being washed in cold water it is called sulphite, and
is ready to be mixed with mechanical ground pulp to form paper, small
quantities of china clay, size, soda-ash, resin, and blue and red earth
being added as a kind of seasoning.
Such, at least, is J. R. Booth’s recipe; for I found that, by a recent
addition to his manifold activities, he now makes paper. They took me
through the mill, a long building containing several machines stretched
out in a perspective of great cylinders, suggesting the segments of a
huge iron caterpillar.
It seemed that the mixture of pulp, sulphite, and accessories has to
pass through a refining engine on its way from one receptacle to
another. Afterwards I saw it pouring like gruel on to each caterpillar’s
tail. Under a shower-bath of water sprays—necessary for breaking
bubbles—the liquid paper ran on to rotating screens, and was received
on moving belts of wire gauze. The endless web of grey liquid soon
became a web of white substance.
My companion bade me note the “suction box.” This was a gap in a metal
cylinder, and as the material ran over that gap it was sucked inward,
with consequent loss of moisture. Now watch its gliding, serpentine
course over thirty cylinders, heated by steam, until, finally—as dry,
warm, immaculate paper—it is wound into rolls of from four to five
miles. Its journey has been to and fro, back and turn, for the cylinders
are ranged in double and treble tiers; yet but a minute or so elapses
between the fluid state and the finished stage, each caterpillar reeling
off paper at the pace of 525 feet per minute.
I have forgotten how many tons of J. R. Booth’s paper are now absorbed
by England, what quantity goes to the States, and the proportion
consumed in Canada; but I remember that thirty-nine rolls make a
car-load, and that those destined for an ocean voyage are furnished with
an extra wrapper and have their edges protected by burlap hessian.
To be talking with the Lumber King is to find yourself in the presence
of a man unlike anyone you have ever met before, the reason being that
J. R. Booth is content to be J. R. Booth. As a matter of fact, everybody
is unlike everybody else; but the average mortal disguises his
personality with conventionalities of manner, so that only after a
while, and from chance clues, do you “get to know him.” J. R. Booth is
natural and genuine even at a first acquaintance; in this respect, as in
others, being a conspicuous example of a national virtue. For, whereas
the island-bred Briton loves to present a surface of polished veneer,
the Canadian is satisfied to be solid oak.
To have briskly opened the door, to have entered the office graciously
smiling, to have uttered a few formal words of welcome—that is how it
would have been with most people. That is not how it was with J. R.
Booth. Sitting sideways at the corner of the table, I did not know he
had arrived until, on turning, I found him, with head thoughtfully bent,
quietly seated at right angles to me. A bearing so devoid of pretence
wins instant confidence and respect, if at first it be a little
disconcerting.
It was left to me to start the conversation, and I plunged into some
unpremeditated talk about trees. What was the best sort for
paper-making? Hemlock, he explained, was good, but any kind of hard
timber would do if it hadn’t gum in it. Gum prevented the acid
penetrating the fibre. Couldn’t they extract the gum? Yes; they were
learning how to do that, and paper had been made from pitch pine after
the turpentine and gum were extracted. Did his own processes yield any
by-products? Well, a good deal of gummy substance came out of spruce
during the cooking process, but it was mixed with the acid, and a market
for it had not been found. “Except for the acid,” said J. R. Booth
thoughtfully, “it would make good chewing-gum.”
In an interrogatory spirit, I mentioned the great trees of British
Columbia. But the old man shook his head. There was, it seemed, a great
deal of pitch in them. “I don’t know of any place in the world,” he
added, “where, for softness and lightness and durability, you would get
anything to match our white pines.”
But all this time—as the keen blue eyes seemed fully aware—my
questions were unrelated to the matter uppermost in my mind. I really
did not feel curious about the trees. It was not my intention to start a
rival pulp and paper mill. I was not even proposing to write a treatise
on the subject. My desire was to gain some clues to the working of an
abnormal business brain. I sought to lead the conversation in that
direction.
How much paper did he make? One hundred tons a day, and about forty tons
of cardboard. How many hands did he employ? In summer, 2,400 at the
mills, and very nearly as many more in the woods. Then I gave tongue to
my thoughts.
“Paper-making is obviously a very delicate and complex matter,” I said.
“How came you to strike out in that new direction at the age of eighty,
and when you already had such vast undertakings to engage your
attention?”
Had I asked him the time, he could not have replied with greater
readiness or in a tone more matter of fact.
“Yes,” he said, “paper requires a great deal of care. When I took it up
I didn’t know anything about it, and that was a little disadvantage for
a while. You ask why I took it up. Well, I had a railroad—four hundred
miles—and I sold it. I felt rather lost without my railroad. So I took
up paper.”
Could any explanation be more complete or more simple? J. R. Booth
hadn’t enough to occupy him, so he “took up paper.”
Before going further with our conversation, I ought to explain what lay
behind that other simple sentence: “I had a railroad.”
From an admirable biographical sketch in _Collier’s_ I take the
following interesting facts: “Booth had no idea of becoming a railway
owner till Governor Smith, of Vermont, came along one day and told a
hard-luck story. Smith and his associates had started the Canada
Atlantic as a feeder to the Central Vermont, and the enterprise was
costing money. They asked for the co-operation of Booth. They got it;
and one day J. R. Booth woke up to the realisation that he must take the
work over and carry it on himself if it was to be done at all. It might
be throwing good money after bad, and it might not. Booth plunged again.
He built the Canada Atlantic from Couteau Junction to Depôt Harbour, and
he built the Ottawa, Arnprior and Parry Sound Railway, four hundred
miles of main line and a hundred miles of sidings. He bought engines and
cars and he built shops. There being no terminus on the Georgian Bay, he
created a terminus. When the line was nearly completed to the bay, he
invited the Premier of Canada, Sir Wilfrid Laurier—then in his first
year of office—to go over it with him. They went to the end of the
steel, and from there walked half a mile to the shores of the bay,
described by Sir Wilfrid as ‘a bleak shore, without a building upon it.’
‘This,’ said J. R. Booth, ‘is the terminus of my railway.’ The Prime
Minister asked: ‘Where is your trade to come from?’ Booth answered: ‘I
shall have to create it. I shall have to collect it from Port Arthur,
from Duluth, from Chicago, and from both sides of the lakes. I shall
have to build elevators. I shall, perhaps, have to buy wheat in order to
furnish trade for my railway.’
“All that the one-time bridge carpenter told the Prime Minister he would
do he did. He made Depôt Harbour. He built elevators. He put a line of
steamers upon the lakes, and he forced so much of the Western trade into
a new channel down through Ontario that the Canada Atlantic was carrying
yearly two hundred thousand tons of flour and package freight and twenty
million bushels of grain. The man who built it had seen to it that the
railway was a good one. Other people saw that it was a good one. The
Canadian Northern hankered after it. Seward Webb, of New York, went so
far as to get an option on it—an option which is said to have left the
New York financier poorer and J. R. Booth richer by a quarter of a
million. The Conservative Opposition in the Canadian Parliament wanted
the country to buy the Canada Atlantic, and join it to the
Inter-Colonial as an alternative to the Grand Trunk Pacific project. The
Government refused to do it, because they said that they could not do
what J. R. Booth had done. Then along came the Grand Trunk and took the
Canada Atlantic, and John R. Booth put fourteen million dollars down
into his clothes.”
I think he must, at first, have been glad to be rid of his railroad
responsibilities. At any rate, that was one of the occasions when, as
though in festive mood, he played the part of Santa Claus in the family
circle, presenting each of his two sons and each of his two daughters
with one million dollars—a little attention certainly calculated to
fortify a parent in the esteem of his children.
But, as we have learnt, any temporary feeling of relief was followed by
a sense of not having enough to do; and so he set in to assist feeding
the newspaper Press and the cardboard users of Europe and North America.
And now to resume the report of our conversation.
“But,” I said, when he confessed to having felt lost without his
railway, “you still had your enormous timber business to occupy you?”
“Oh,” he replied, “I’ve been in lumber so long that the exciting part of
it has got worn off.”
The “exciting part!” Here was a clue, and I eagerly probed further.
“Then the interest lies in the doing, not in the results?” I asked,
speaking from the depths of my ignorance of what it feels like to be a
millionaire.
“Yes,” said J. R. Booth, “to build up and afterwards to improve—that
occupies the mind, and is a great pleasure; but he is a miserable man
who gets to the end of it.”
His words carried a note of pathos to the ear. There was no mistaking
the implication—a great organising capitalist, a millionaire many times
over, was suggested as a case for compassion.
I did not speak. The earnest expression of those blue eyes told me there
was more to come.
“The advantage,” J. R. Booth went on, “is certainly with the manual
worker, as distinguished from the man who does the mental part. If he is
healthy, and sleeps well, and eats well, no man enjoys life more than
the working man. Only,” he added ruefully, “you can’t make him believe
it. I have been in both places, and I prefer the heavy end of it.”
Those words were ringing in my memory when, later in the afternoon, I
was talking with one of J. R. Booth’s lieutenants. He was telling me
something that I scarcely needed to be told, namely, that the entire
staff felt, not merely respect, but personal affection for the old
man—the wonderful old man whose knowledge, patience and industry seemed
without limit; the old man who was never known to be beaten by a
difficulty.
And even while we were talking I chanced to look through the glass panel
of a door that gave entrance to an inner office. In that office I again
saw J. R. Booth. But it was J. R. Booth in a new aspect—an aspect that
held my eyes enthralled. The Lumber King was leaning over a desk
studying some document, his face alight with interest, yet immovable as
marble.
Only once before in my life had I seen that absorbed expression on a
human countenance. I was being conducted over the library of the late
William Ewart Gladstone, while the venerable statesman sat there writing
at his table near the window. A member of the family accompanied me, and
began to explain, in a loud voice, the space-saving arrangement of the
books. “Hush!” I whispered, “we must not disturb Mr. Gladstone.” “He
will not hear,” came the hearty reply. “I had no idea,” was my comment,
“that his deafness was so serious.” “Neither is it,” I was informed;
“but when Mr. Gladstone is absorbed in mental work a pistol-shot would
not disturb him.”
The unmoving face I saw last year in the Ottawa office, like that other
unmoving face I saw years ago in the Hawarden library, seemed
mesmerised, and to have the power of mesmerising me.
I was paying but scant attention to my companion’s explanations about
some knotty business problem that had arisen to engage the attention of
J. R. Booth. It was a matter, he mentioned, that must be settled before
the mail went out.
At this I pricked up my ears, realising, with a curious sense of regret,
that the old man’s present ecstasy would be short-lived. This thought
brought in its train a further reflection: obviously the paper
enterprise was now running on a smooth and perfected basis. Therefore it
must have lost its efficacy as a substitute for the railroad.
“When does Mr. Booth start his new venture?” I asked.
“But,” exclaimed my astonished companion, “you surely have not
heard——”
I hastened to explain that I spoke from the merest abstract conjecture.
“Strange!” he rejoined. “As a matter of fact, a new departure is in
contemplation. Come back here in two years’ time, and—well, I think you
will be interested in what you see.”
[Illustration: MARKET DAY IN MONTREAL: SCENE IN JACQUES CARTIER SQUARE]