before me.  Very soon I induced my directors to adopt the view that the railway company must encourage and help the project.  This done the course was clear.  They were not so sanguine as I, but they had not lived in Scotland nor seen how the Royal game flourished there and how it had brought prosperity to many a backward place.  Mr. Baillie’s energy, with the company’s co-operation to back it, were bound to succeed, and on the 23rd March, 1889, with all the pomp and ceremony suitable to the occasion (including special trains, and a fine luncheon given by the Directors of the Company) the Golf links at Newcastle, Co.  Down, were formally opened by the late Lord Annesley.  From that time onward golf in Ireland advanced by leaps and bounds.  Including Newcastle, there were then in the whole country, only six clubs and now they number one hundred and sixty-eight!  The County Down Railway Company’s splendid hotel on the links at Newcastle, with its 140 rooms, and built at a cost of 100,000 pounds, I look upon as the crowning glory of our golfing exploration on that winter day in 1888.  To construct such a hotel, at such a cost, was a plucky venture for a railway possessing only 80 miles of line, but the County Down was always a plucky company, and the Right Honourable Thomas Andrews, its Chairman, to whom its inception and completion is chiefly due, was a bold, adventurous and successful man.

Another experience somewhat removed from ordinary railway affairs that helped to enliven the latter part of my time on the County Down, and added variety to the work imposed by the Railway and Canal Traffic Act and the revision of Rates and Charges, was a project in which I became engaged connected with the Isle of Man.

Joseph Mylchreest was a Manxman, a rough diamond but a man of sterling worth.  He left home when young and worked first as a ship’s carpenter.  An adventurous spirit led him to seek his fortune in various parts of the world—­in the goldfields of California and Australia and in the silver mines of Peru and Chili.  Later on he went to South Africa, where in the diamond mines he met with great success and made a large fortune.  His property there he disposed of to Cecil Rhodes, and it now, I am told, forms part of the De Beers Consolidated Company’s assets.  In the late eighties he returned to his native island, settled at Peel, and became a magnate there.

One afternoon early in the year 1889 two gentlemen from the Isle of Man called upon me at my office.  They were Mr. Mylchreest (the “Diamond King”) and a lawyer friend whose name I forget, but I remember they informed me they were both members of the House of Keys.  Mr. Mylchreest was anxious to do something to develop the little port of Peel, his native town, and a steamboat service between Peel and Belfast, Bangor or Donaghadee, seemed to him and his friends a promising project.  What did the County Down think?  Would either Bangor or Donaghadee be better than