Westward with the Prince of Wales

by W. Douglas Newton

From the pit the lift took him aloft again to the big sampling and classifying room on the tenth floor of the building. The long tables of this room were littered with small bags of grain, and with grain in piles undergoing tests. The floor was strewn with spilled wheat and oats and corn. Here he was shown how grain, carried to Winnipeg in the long trucks, was sampled and brought to this room in bags. Here it was classified by experts, who, by touch, taste and smell, could gauge its quality unerringly.

It is the perfection of a system for handling grain in the raw mass. The buyer never sees the grain he purchases. The classification of the Exchange is so reliable that he accepts its certificates of quality and weight and buys on paper alone.

Nor are the dealers ever delayed by this wonderfully working organization. The Exchange has samplers down on the trucks at the railway sidings day and night. During the whole twenty-four hours of the day there are men digging specially constructed scoops that take samples from every level of the car-loads of grain, putting the grain into the small bags, and sending them along to the classification department.

So swiftly is the work done that the train can pull into the immense range of special yards, such as those the C.P.R. have constructed for the accommodation of grain, change its engine and crew, and by the time the change is effected, samples of all the trucks have been taken, and the train can go on to the great elevators and mills at Fort William and Port Arthur.

This rapid handling in no way affects the efficiency of the Exchange. Its decisions are so sure that the grading of the wheat is only disputed about forty times in the year. This is astonishing when one realizes the enormous number of samples judged.

In the same way, and in spite of the apparent confusion about the pit where they take place, the records of the transactions are so exact that only about once in five thousand is such a record queried.

The Prince was immensely interested in all the practical details of working which make this handling of grain a living and dramatic thing, showing, as usual, that active curiosity for workaday facts that is essential to the make-up of the moderns.

His directness and accessibility made friends for him with these hard-headed business men as readily as it had made friends with soldiers and with the mass of people. Winnipeg had already exerted its Western faculty for affectionate epithets. He had already been dubbed a "Fine Kiddo," and it was commonplace to hear people say of him, "He's a regular feller, he'll do." They said these things again in the Exchange, declaring emphatically he was "sure, a manly-looking chap."

As he left the Exchange the members switched the chaos of the pit into shouts of a more hearty and powerful volume, and to listen to a crowd of such fully-seasoned lungs doing their utmost in the confined space of a building is an awe-inspiring and terrific experience.

The friendliness here was but a "classified sample"—if the Winnipeg Exchange will permit that expression—of the friendliness in bulk he found all over Canada, and which he found in the great West, upon which he was now entering.