found at home. So we ploughed and cross-ripped the clods with disc-harrows and when the seeders had drilled in the grain, I shook hands with Hunter and went back to my own partner.

It was hay-time when I visited Fairmead again, and found my hosts darker in color and considerably more ragged than before. There is little leisure for the amenities of civilization during the busy summer, and the mending of clothes and sometimes even their washing is indefinitely postponed. The prairie also had changed, for the transitory flush of green was gone, while birchen bluff and willow-fringed ravine formed comforting oases of foliage and cool shadow, and, when the blazing sun beat down upon the parched white sod, the rippling waves of dull green wheat were pleasant to look upon. Now, thereabouts at least, horses and oxen must be fed during the long winter, when the prairie is sheeted with frozen snow, and hay-harvest is accordingly a matter of some anxiety. Artificial grasses are rarely sown, and the settler trusts to Nature to supply him, while throughout much of Manitoba and Assiniboia on the levels the natural grasses are too short for cutting. The hay must therefore be gathered in the dried-up sloos where it may reach almost breast high. Timber for building being also lamentably scarce, implements, for lack of shelter, are usually left where they last were used, and while I drove off with the light wagon, my friends set forth in search of the mowing-machine. was dazzlingly hot and bright, and the long sweep of prairie seemed to melt into a transparent shimmering, with a birchen bluff floating above it like an island here and there.

It

At times a jack rabbit, now the color and much the same size of an English hare, filed before the rattling wheels, or a flock of prairie chickens flattened themselves half-seen among the grass, while tall sandhill cranes stalked ma

jestically along the crest of a distant rise. On foot one cannot get within a half-mile range of them, though it is possible to drive fast into gunshot occasionally, but in hay-time there is little leisure for sport. Thick gray dust rose up, and the wagon, a light frame on four spider wheels, which two men could lift, jolted distressfully as it lurched across the swelling levels, until a mounted figure waved an arm upon the horizon, and I knew the machine had been found. It lay with one wheel in the air, buried among the grass, and half-an-hour's labor with oil-can and spanner was needed before it could be induced to work at all, while then there was a great groaning of rusty gear as the long knife rasped through the harsh grass. Unlike the juicy product of English meadows, it rose before us saw-edged, dry and white, though we had no doubt about its powers of nutriment.

There were flies in legions, and the hot air was thick with mosquitoes larger and more thirsty than any met in the Tropics (where they are bad enough in all conscience), so declining Hunter's net (which hung like a meat-safe gauze beneath the brim of his hat) I anointed my face and hair with kerosene. Still, at times, the insects almost conquered us, as I afterwards saw them put to rout a surveying party in British Columbia, and it became difficult to lead the tortured horses. One does not, however, expect an easy time upon the prairie, and the hay was badly needed; so, bitten all over, we held on until the little sloo was exhausted. The sun had already dried the grasses better than we could do, and when the wagon was loaded high I went back with it while the others tramped out into the heat in search of another sloo.

When I reached the house it was filled with Hunter's white chickens, which had sought refuge there from the swoop of a hawk. The caulking

had fallen out from between the warping logs, and the roof, which was partly tin and partly shingles, crackled audibly under the heat. But there was only time to pack up a little food, and when the wagon was lightened, grimed thick with dust and a long wake of insects streaming behind my head, I drove out again. From sloo to sloo we wandered, halting once for a plunge into a shrunken creek where lay three feet of lukewarm fluid and two feet of mud, and it was nightfall when we thankfully turned our faces homewards. A little cool breeze, invigorating as champagne, came down out of the North where still lingered a great transparency, and the sun-bleached prairie had changed into a dim mysterious sea, with unreal headlands of birch and willow rolling back its ridges. Every growing thing gave up its fragrance as it drank in the dew, and through all the odors floated the sweet pervading essence of wild peppermint, which is the typical scent of that country.

Somewhere in the shadows a coyote howled dismally; at times with a faint rustling some shadowy beast slipped by; but save for this there was a deep, dead stillness and an overwhelming sense of vastness and infinity. Under its influence one could neither chatter idly nor fret over petty cares, and I remember how, aching, scorched and freely speckled with mosquito-bites, we lay silent upon the peppermint-scented hay. Meantime, far out in the rim of the prairie, the red fires rioted among the grass, while here and there long trains of filmy vapor blotted out the stars; but Hunter had ploughed deep furrows round his holding and had no cause to fear them. At last, only halfawake, we unyoked the beasts, devoured such cold food as we could find, and sank into heavy slumber until the sun roused us to begin another day.

It was late in autumn, and bluff and copse were glorious with many-colored

leaves, waiting, frost-nipped, for the first breeze to strew them across the prairie, when I saw the last of Hunter's crop. The crackling grass lay ready for its covering of snow, and the yellow stubble, stripped of the heavy ears, stood four-square, solid and rigid above the prairie. The crop had escaped the frost, the binders had gone, and now the black smoke of the threshing-machine hung motionless in the cool, transparent atmosphere above the piled-up sheaves. Hunter's heart was glad. After a hard struggle, patient wafting and very plain living, the soil had returned what he had entrusted it to him a hundredfold. Better still, frost having been bad in Manitoba, Winnipeg millers and shippers were waiting for every bushel.

Still, there was no rest for him, and he worked as men who fight for their own hand only can do, grimed with smoke and dust beside the huge separator which hummed and thudded as it devoured the sheaves. Ox and horse were also busy, hauling the filled bags to the granary, which is merely a shapeless mound of short straw piled many feet thick over a willow-branch framing, to form, when wind-packed, a cheap and efficient store. Men panted, laughed and jested, with every sinew strained to the uttermost and the perspiration splashing from them, for the system of centralization which makes a machine of the individual has so far no place in that country, and, being paid by the bushel, the reward of each was in direct ratio to his labors. Yet there was neither abuse nor foul language, and they drank green tea, while no man derided the weaker, where each did his best and there was plenty for all.

Then, when at last even the moonlight had faded and three borrowed wagons stood beside the threshing-machine piled high with bags of grain, a bountiful supper was spread upon the grass, because room could not be found

upon the best in the land, as do the kindly neighbors who work for no money, and already Hunter's chickenhouse was empty, while the painful necessity of acting as executioner with a big axe affected the writer's appetite. The vitality sometimes lingers a few moments in decapitated fowls, and the dressing of several dozen, even when dipped in boiling water, was not pleasant to remember when eating them, in spite of the consolation that no more remained. Next day I knew I must drive nearly sixty miles to the settlement and back for more provisions. They ate, then, as they had worked, thoroughly and well, French Canadian, Ontario Scotsman, young Englishman, and a few keen-witted wanderers from across the frontier of the great Republic, forgetting all distinctions of caste and race in the bond of a common purpose. Tradition counts for nothing on the white wheat-lands; they are at once too new and too old for it. Empty selfassertion is also worthless, and it is only by self-denial, endurance and steadfast labor that any one can win Macmillan's Magazine.

had a right to the content he felt, for by stubbornly holding on in the face of bitter disappointments he had won that harvest.

It was six weeks later, and the prairie lay white under the first fall of snow, when with three panting teams, whose breath rose like steam in the nipping air before us, we hauled the last loads on steel runners out of the sliding drifts, through the smooth-beaten streets of a straggling wooden town to the gaunt elevators. Long, snow-besprinkled trains of trucks were waiting on the sidings; huge locomotives snorted, backing more trucks in, for from north and south and west other teams were coming up out of the prairie with the grain that was needed to feed the swarming peoples of the older world. At last the whirring wheels were silent for a few moments' space; the empty wagons were drawn aside to make room for newcomers; and Hunter's eyes were rather dim than bright with emotion as he spread out before me the receipts which he would presently convert into coin and dollar bills.

Harold Bindloss.

The searching pathos of violin strings thrilled through the accompaniment of pattering spring rain. From the cottage, tapestried by green growth of cotoneaster, its berries touched by wet into redder shining, the violin part of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony streamed out, conveying a sense of contrast akin to that produced by a beautiful voice proceeding from a street singer. Kill-o'-the-Knock was, however, as the proverbial swine. As the rarefied cravings of a soul beating to and fro in a sealed silence were rendered to it through the falling rain, the pearl was trodden underfoot, with no other epitaph than an occasional murmur that "Father McVeagh had got at his ould fiddle, so he had, an' wasn't it the wondher he couldn't make out be now to play a good chune, instid av screechin' an scrawlin' on the sthrings like a hin pickin'!"

Notwithstanding Kill-o'-the-Knock's verdict, the Fourth Symphony proceeded to one auditor's content. Father McVeagh, in his sordid parlor, where the only hint of the luxuries of life was a pile of dog-eared music-sheets, bent his head over the sounds born under his coarse fingers with an entire satisfaction. The violin, resting on the shoulder of the rusty cassock represented variety, romance, all to which a hot-blooded young man had first wakened before the cassock had grown rusty, when its black straitness had seemed to him an inexorable prison. Perhaps the reason of Father McVeagh's sympathetic rendering of Beethoven might lie in the fact that to each, life had branded the same lesson on the quivering soul, of a compulsory resignation:

"Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren!"

It had come to Father McVeagh more than once to be visited with scruples as to the lawfulness of indulgence in so keen a pleasure. The intensity of the Celt lends itself to the making of saints as of sinners. The embryo of an ascetic lay in the country priest, but undeveloped, merely chafing his simple nature, as thorns mar the smoothness of the stem on which, in other circumstances, they might have unfolded as leaves. Yet the ascetic might have triumphed if the man had not been so strong. In earlier years the violin had throbbed the night through, mastering a wordless craving by counterpoint, or wrestling with a memory and a fugue. Nowadays a tender growth of "rosemary for remembrance" alone marked the grave of a dead grief for Father McVeagh, but his violin had assumed for him an identity as though the self imprisoned, Daphne-like, within constricting circumstance, had somehow breathed its vague aspirations and latent possibilities into the instrument picked up thirty years back in a pawnshop of Galway Claddagh.

The Fourth Symphony had ended in an April burst of jubilancy and pathos, and the musician began to anticipate agreeably a prospect of sloke for supper. That maritime delicacy diffusing a salty odor through the house, Father McVeagh wandered kitchenwards, with the intention of "giving a call" on the ancient crone officiating as priest's housekeeper, when a sound of altercation between some unseen personage and his taciturn janitor caused him to stop short with the instinctive wariness of the bachelor. "Musha, 'tisn't mesilf would have his riv'rince hiked out av his holy books this time av' night," declared a laugh

"Och, ask away!" Grace rebutted his claims on her hospitality.

"Whethen, woman dear, 'tis takin' me fur the sarpint St. Pathrick boxed up in Lough Swilly ye do be, an' him askin' away fur the bare life av it isn't to morrow yit! Av I'd as many tongues as teeth in me head I cudn't spake ye swater. Alanna, let me now in, an' the angels'll be contindin' to dhress yez in glory."

"An' I'll want thim as little as yersilf"; thus Cerberus, implacable.

"Arrah, dear, 'tis jokin' me this while Je've been," pursued her undaunted petitioner. "Begorra, now I see clost, yersilf's not th' ould heifer wan'll go look fur in his riv'rance's house; 'tis puttin' the comether on me ye've been afther, whin yere mother's out av the way."

"Och, ye're the gabby boy intirely." The retort of the priest's warden had a distinctly mollified intonation. "An' what may they be callin' yez when they've a min' fur the recreation of yere company?"

"Eugene Keeffe-what else?"

A fire, which Father McVeagh had fancied smothered, leapt up his veins at the sound of a name which twenty odd years ago he had often enough in the swirl of passion thirsted to curse from the altar. His son! The careless face before the priest's bodily sight grew brutal, the blue eyes

drink-reddened. Her son! Father McVeagh came forward.

66

"In with ye, me man," he said hospitably. 'Tis easier gettin' wet than dry this night annyhow, an' ye're strange in these parts maybe."

Grace, thus suddenly set at nought in her dominions, and aghast as Crusoe at sight of a stranger's track across her tiles, received with indignation her master's request "to put the boy's name down" for supper. Slight though her extra preparations might be, they sufficed admirably, even the moderate portion of sloke which Father McVeagh had allotted to himself cooling unnoticed as he listened to his guest's conversation with the quietude with which one seeks to anticipate a blow. It fell.

Eugene Keeffe pushed away his plate at last.

"That's powerful good stuff," he observed. "Mesilf hasn't tasted the like since me poor mother-rest her sowl!would be afther givin' it us fur a bit av a thrate, an' me not the heighth av a match."

The son's casual requiescat had told all.

"Och, 'twas hersilf would have gone through the eye av a needle fur me," the young man resumed, lapsing into luxurious reminiscence. "Sorra chick nor child had she barrin' mesilf, an' 'twas great store she set be me."

Within the crystal of memory the mists of the past were dissolving for Father McVeagh. In the setting of a fire-lit kitchen a picture rose before him, a woman fulfilling the sweetest duty of motherhood, her hand and arm curved with a pressure indescribably tender round the baby on her bosom. Not even the violin could exorcise from its master the haunting of the woman he might have loved.

"Dead and gone is she now, the cratur," sounded Eugene's obituary. "Och, thin, it bates Banagher what at all