revenue and expenditure alter their relations to the detriment of dividend, become critical, carping and impossible to please, though the directors and management may be as innocent as themselves, and as powerless to stem the tide of adversity.  At shareholders’ meetings Mr. Burns was splendid.  He rose after the critics had expended their force, or if the storm grew too violent, intervened at its height, and with facts and figures and sound argument always succeeded in restoring order and serenity.  An excellent story of him appeared about this time in Good Words.  He, Anthony Trollope and Norman Macleod were once at a little inn in the Highlands.  After supper, stories were told and the laughter, which was loud and long, lasted far into the night.  In the morning an old gentleman, who slept in a room above them, complained to the landlord of the uproar which had broken his night’s rest, and expressed his astonishment that such men should have taken more than was good for them.  “Well,” replied the landlord, “I am bound to confess there was much loud talk and laughter, but they had nothing stronger than tea and fresh herrings.”  “Bless me,” rejoined the old gentleman, “if that is so, what would they be after dinner!”

In the entrance hall of the North British Railway Company’s Waverley station at Edinburgh stands the statue, in bronze, of Mr. John Walker.  As far as I know this is, the whole world over, the only instance in which the memory of a railway general manager has been so honoured.  It is of heroic size and eloquently attests his worth.  He was born in Fifeshire in 1832, and died with startling suddenness from an apoplectic seizure, at the age of fifty-nine, at Waterloo station in London.  When he left school he was apprenticed to the law, but at the age of nineteen entered the service of the Edinburgh, Perth and Dundee Railway.  This railway was in 1862 amalgamated with the original North British, which was first authorised in 1844, and extended from Edinburgh to Berwick.  His exceptional ability was soon recognised and his promotion was rapid.  He became treasurer of the amalgamated company, and in 1866 was appointed its secretary.  In this office he rendered great service at a trying time in the company’s affairs, and in 1874 was rewarded with the position of general manager.

The North British Railway has had a chequered career, has suffered great changes of fortune, and to Mr. Walker, more than to any other, is due the stability it now enjoys.  On the occasion of his death, the directors officially recorded that, “He served the company with such ability and unselfish devotion as is rarely witnessed; became first secretary and subsequently general manager, and it was during the tenure of these offices that the remarkable development of the company’s system was mainly effected.”