gnorance. This
district of yours--" he added very slowly, "is a bigger, richer thing
than even I imagined."

Semple went away shaking his head doubtfully. He knew better than
Clark that chilling regard with which Toronto financiers contemplated
an undertaking in which they had little faith. They were a cold-nosed
group, immune, he considered, to the dramatic and strangers to any
sudden impulse. And Clark, to their minds, was tarred with the same
brush as his undertakings. He might be big and imaginative, but he was
over impetuous and haphazard.

Clark himself was disturbed by no discomfort, nor did he make any
special preparations for that address, and gave it as arranged some two
weeks later, and the manner and substance and effect of it will be
vividly remembered by every man who was a member of that Board of Trade
some twenty-five years ago. There were the bankers and the rest of
them, just as Semple had said, and Clark, surveying them from the
platform with steady gray eyes, knew what make of men they were and
knew also that they had come there not so much with a thirst for
knowledge about their own country as that they might coldly analyze him
and that vast undertaking of which they had, as yet, but a fantastic
and fragmentary knowledge.

It is without question that the speaker had to an infinitely greater
extent than any of the men who stared at him through a blue haze of
cigar smoke, a fluid mind and the capacity for instantly seizing upon a
situation and determining how to meet it. He possessed as well a voice
unrivaled in magnetic power and above all an unshakable faith in the
potentiality of the district in which he labored, so that, estimating
the mental and professional characteristics of those he faced, Clark
began to talk in the coolest and most level way possible without any
trace of flamboyant enthusiasm. Touching first of all on the
development of the far West, a subject with which, since much Toronto
money was involved, they were directly familiar, he diverted to St.
Marys, describing Arcadia as he found it, the apparently unpromising
nature of the surrounding territory and his own conclusion as to its
possible future. Then the rapids became woven into his speech, the
nucleus of power which made so many things possible. From this he
moved into the wilderness and before his listeners there began to
unroll the north country in its primeval silence, broken only by the
occasional tap of a pro