wanted to come. My people did not come."

She clipped the last sentence in a manner that suggested to Farr that
there was no more to be said on that topic. But she went on after a time
in softened tones.

"It is not strange that so many came to the States, sir. The farms of
Beauce, of l'Islet, of the Chaudiere, were so crowded. Years ago, the
old folks used to tell me, the boys began to drive the little white
horses hitched to buckboards across the border in the early summer, and
the boys were strong and willing, and the farmers who laughed at them
and called them Canucks hired them for the hay-fields just the same.
And they slept in the haymows and under the trees and worked hard and
brought back all their money. Then the big mills needed men and women
and children, and the Yankee girls would not work in the mills any
more. You must understand how it was: Ouillette, who had worked in the
hay-field, would hear of the work in the mill, and the Ouillettes would
sell and go to the city. And as soon as they had seen the lights and
the theater and the car which ran with a stick on a wire, and had earned
their first pay and had bought Yankee clothes they wrote home to their
cousins the Pelletiers and the Pelletiers sat nights till late talking
excitedly--and then they sold and came, and so it has gone on and
on--the endless chain, one family pulling on its neighbor, down the long
way from Canada to the States. But it may be all for the best. I am not
wise in such things. But when the sun bakes and the fever comes and the
children die in the tenements, then I wish the fathers and mothers were
back on the little farms and that workers of some other race than the
habitants were chained to the looms in the big mills. That may be a
selfish thought, but my own people are dear to me."

Farr was not in the mood to argue the economic side of that question
with this girl who had so tersely told the story of two generations
of mill-toilers. With that little waif between them, victim of the
industrial Moloch which must roll on even if its wheels crushed the
innocent here and there, he permitted sentiment to sway him. In fact,
for a day and a night he had surrendered to sentiment and had found a
strange sort of intoxication in the experience. His heart was with the
humble folk and pity was in him--pity which was uncalculating and in
which his cynicism was dissolving.

And when the stars were mirrored in the still canal and the grass w