ng to Sally, and it was not
astonishing that they talked of farming, which is the standard topic on
that strip of prairie.

"So you're not going to break that new piece this spring?" she asked.

"No," answered Hawtrey; "I'd want another team, anyway, and I can't
raise the money; it's hard to get out here."

"Plenty under the sod," declared Sally, who was essentially practical.
"That's where we get ours, but you have to put the breaker in and turn
it over. You"--and she flashed a quick glance at him--"got most of yours
from England. Won't they send you any more?"

Hawtrey's eyes twinkled as he shook his head. "I'm afraid they won't,"
he replied. "You see, I've put the screw on them rather hard the last
few years."

"How did you do that?" Sally inquired. "Told them you were thinking of
coming home again?"

There was a certain wryness in the young man's smile, for though Hawtrey
had cast no particular slur upon the family's credit he had signally
failed to enhance it, and he was quite aware that his English relatives
did not greatly desire his presence in the Old Country.

"My dear," he said, "you really shouldn't hit a fellow in the eye that
way."

As it happened, he did not see the girl's face just then, or he might
have noticed a momentary change in its expression. Gregory Hawtrey was a
little casual in speech, but, so far, most of the young women upon whom
he bestowed an epithet indicative of affection had attached no
significance to it. They had wisely decided that he did not mean
anything.

The Scottish fiddler's voice broke in.

"Can ye no' watch the music? Noo it's paddy-bash!" he cried.

His French Canadian comrade waved his fiddle-bow protestingly.

"Paddybashy! _V'la la belle chose!_" he exclaimed with ineffable
contempt, and broke in upon the ranting melody with a succession of
harsh, crashing chords.

Then began a contest as to which could drown the other's instrument, and
the snapping time grew faster, until the dancers gasped, and men who
wore long boots encouraged them with cries and stamped a staccato
accompaniment upon the benches or on the floor. It was savage, rasping
music, but one player infused into it the ebullient nerve of France, and
the other was from the misty land where the fiddler learns the witchery
of the clanging reel and the swing of the Strathspey. It is doubtless
not high art, but there is probably no music in the world that fires the
blood like this and turns the sober