In the wide stretches of a new country there is nothing to bound a local excitement, or to impede its transmission at full value.

Elgin was a manufacturing town in southern Ontario, but they would have known every development of the Federal Bank case at the North Pole if there had been anybody there to learn.

In Halifax they did know it, and in Vancouver, B.C., while every hundred miles nearer it warmed as a topic in proportion.

In Montreal the papers gave it headlines; from Toronto they sent special reporters.

Of course, it was most of all the opportunity of Mr Horace Williams, of the Elgin Express, and of Rawlins, who held all the cards in their hands, and played them, it must be said, admirably, reducing the Mercury to all sorts of futile expedients to score, which the Express would invariably explode with a guffaw of contradiction the following day.