The Project Gutenberg EBook of Over Prairie Trails, by Frederick Philip Grove

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Title: Over Prairie Trails

Author: Frederick Philip Grove

Release Date: July, 2004 [EBook #6111]
Posting Date: June 13, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OVER PRAIRIE TRAILS ***

Produced by Gardner Buchanan

OVER PRAIRIE TRAILS

By Frederick Philip Grove

Contents

Introductory
1 Farms and Roads
2 Fog
3 Dawn and Diamonds
4 Snow
5 Wind and Waves
6 A Call for Speed
7 Skies and Scares

Introductory

A few years ago it so happened that my work--teaching school--kept me
during the week in a small country town in the centre of one of the
prairie provinces while my family--wife and little daughter--lived in
the southern fringe of the great northern timber expanse, not very far
from the western shore of a great lake. My wife--like the plucky little
woman she is--in order to round off my far-from-imperial income had made
up her mind to look after a rural school that boasted of something like
a residence. I procured a buggy and horse and went "home" on Fridays,
after school was over, to return to my town on Sunday evening--covering
thus, while the season was clement and allowed straight cross-country
driving, coming and going, a distance of sixty-eight miles. Beginning
with the second week of January this distance was raised to ninety miles
because, as my more patient readers will see, the straight cross-country
roads became impassable through snow.

These drives, the fastest of which was made in somewhat over four
hours and the longest of which took me nearly eleven--the rest of them
averaging pretty well up between the two extremes--soon became what made
my life worth living. I am naturally an outdoor creature--I have lived
for several years "on the tramp"--I love Nature more than Man--I take to
horses--horses take to me--so how could it have been otherwise? Add
to this that for various reasons my work just then was not of the most
pleasant kind--I disliked the town, the town disliked me, the school
board was sluggish and unprogressi