as
planned.

Mr. Hill's experience would seem to prove that life after all is a
sequence, and the man who does great work has long been in training for
it.

* * * * *

There are two ways for a traveling-man to make money: one is to sell the
goods, and the other is to work the expense-account.

There are two ways to make money by managing a railroad: one is through
service to the people along the line of the road; the other is through
working the bondholders.

It was the eventful year of Eighteen Hundred Seventy-six, before James
J. Hill really got up steam. He was then thirty-eight years old. He was
agent for the Saint Paul and Pacific, and in this capacity he had seen
that the road was being run with the idea of making money by milking the
bondholders.

The line had been pushed just as long as the bondholders of Holland
would put up the money. To keep things going, interest had been paid to
the worthy Dutch out of the money they had supplied. Gradually, the
phlegmatic ones grew wise, and the purse-strings of the Netherlanders
were drawn tight. For hundreds of years Holland had sought a quick
Northwest passage to India. Little did she know she was now warm on the
trail. Little, also, did Jim Hill know.

The equipment--engines and cars--was borrowed, so when the receiver was
appointed he found only the classic streak of rust and right of way. No
doubt both of these would have been hypothecated if it were possible.

Mr. Hill knew the Northwest as no other man did, except, possibly,
Norman Kittson. He had traversed the country from Saint Paul to Winnipeg
on foot, by ox-carts, on horseback, by dog-sledges. He had seen it in
all seasons and under all conditions. He knew the Red River Valley would
raise wheat, and he knew that the prosperity of old Louis Agassiz meant
the prosperity of the railroad that ran between that rich valley and
Saint Anthony's Falls, where the great flouring-mills were situated, the
center of the flour zone having been shifted from Rochester, New York,
to Minneapolis, Minnesota.

To gain possession of the railroad and run it so as to build up the
country, and thus prosper as the farmers prospered, was his ambition. He
was a farmer by prenatal tendency and by education, a commission man by
chance, and a master of transportation by instinct. Every farmer should
be interested in good roads, for his problem is quite as much to get his
products to market as to rai