A FORMER CANADIAN WHO attends a gathering of old settlers at Pembina is quite sure to meet a lot of people who were neighbors of his in the old days, although neither they nor he may have been aware of the fact at the time. So, at the meeting at Pembina on Wednesday, I, who spent most of my youth in Brant county and part of it in Huron, met there former residents of Galt, Guelph, Paris, Goderich, and I don't know how many other places with which I was familiar years ago. There is something in the sharing of experience that makes for friendship. Two men from the same locality in Maine or Illinois who should meet in North Dakota, even though they had never known each other, would find it interesting to compare notes concerning their former home, and if they should find that they knew some of the same people, or had fished in the same creek, or gazed admiringly upon the same bit of scenery, the springs of friendship would be touched, and those men would feel themselves closer to each other than if they had come from opposite sides of the continent. And so, when the old Ontario people foregather, there are created new friendships which have their roots in the experiences of half a century ago.    PEMBINA IS HISTORIC place. It was there that the first fur-trading post in what is now North Dakota was established. There the members of Lord Selkirk's colony established themselves for a time, and some of the descendants of those colonists still live in the vicinity. The first church in this section of the northwest was established there. The little city was an important port in the days of river navigation. There was established a military fort where troops were stationed for the maintenance of order and the preservation of peace between Indians and whites. And into that community poured settlers from eastern Ontario, from the Ottawa valley and French Canadians from Quebec and the New England states. The result is a stable, dependable and progressive community.    ONE OF THE FORMER CANADIANS, for many years a resident of Pembina, is District Judge W. J. Kneeshaw, who was a speaker at the meeting Wednesday. A good many years ago I found that Judge Kneeshaw and I had been near neighbors, my home being in Branford and his at Paris, only 10 miles away. Naturally we knew many of the same people, and in the course of our conversation it developed that his cousin is married to my cousin. Just how he and I are related is left for the class in arithmetic to determine. Another coincidence is that he and my father-in-law, long since deceased, as young men were members of the same militia company that helped to rout the Fenian raiders in 1870. For this services during that disturbance Judge Kneeshaw was awarded a medal by the Canadian government many years ago, and quite recently he was made an honorary member of the Canadian Legion post at Emerson.    JUDGE KNEESAW HAS been known as a lawyer and jurist rather than in connection with agriculture or commerce. Yet it was he who shipped the first wheat that was ever shipped fro Pembina. The shipment was made shortly after the railway had reached Fisher. It consisted of 600 bushels of wheat in sacks and it was shipped by steamer from Pembina to Fisher and thence by rail to St. Paul.    IN THE EARLY DAYS THERE was great rivalry between Pembina and St. Vincent, just across the Red river in Minnesota. In one year both towns arranged for Fourth of July celebrations, and the Pembina committee arranged with a traveling band for a stipulated price to provide music for the celebration there. Somebody in St. Vincent, having no regard for the sanctity of contracts, made a higher bid for the band, which repudiated its original contract and agreed to play at St. Vincent.     PEMBINA COULD NOT SUBMIT to such a breach of contract. A council of war was held and a line of action mapped out. Judge Kneeshaw was at that time a justice of the peace, and there appeared before him complainants asking for legal redress. The judge signed the necessary papers, and when the Winnipeg train arrived it was boarded by peace officers form Pembina, who proceeded, by virtue of the writes which they held, to seize and remove form the train all the band instruments. The spectacle of Jud LaMoure and other notables lugging off drums and bass horn is said to have made a pleasing picture. Than ad accepted the inevitable and played for the Pembina celebration.