and my little girl; they were both as well as they could be. I felt
so glad that I got out of my buggy to hand him my pouch of tobacco, the
which he took readily enough. He praised my wife's work, as no doubt
he had reason to do, and I should have given him a friendly slap on the
shoulder, had not just then my horse taken it into his head to walk away
without me.

I believe I was whistling when I got back to the buggy seat. I know I
slapped the horse's rump with my lines and sang out, "Get up, Peter, we
still have a matter of nearly thirty miles to make."

The road becomes pretty much a mere trail here, a rut-track, smooth
enough in the rut, where the wheels ran, but rough for the horse's feet
in between.

To the left I found the first untilled land. It stretched far away to
the west, overgrown with shrub-willow, wolf-willow and symphoricarpus--a
combination that is hard to break with the plow. I am fond of the silver
grey, leathery foliage of the wolf-willow which is so characteristic of
our native woods. Cinquefoil, too, the shrubby variety, I saw in great
numbers--another one of our native dwarf shrubs which, though decried as
a weed, should figure as a border plant in my millionaire's park.

And as if to make my enjoyment of the evening's drive supreme, I saw
the first flocks of my favourite bird, the goldfinch. All over this vast
expanse, which many would have called a waste, there were strings
of them, chasing each other in their wavy flight, twittering on the
downward stretch, darting in among the bushes, turning with incredible
swiftness and sureness of wing the shortest of curves about a branch,
and undulating away again to where they came from.

To the east I had, while pondering over the beautiful wilderness,
passed a fine bluff of stately poplars that stood like green gold in
the evening sun. They sheltered apparently, though at a considerable
distance, another farmhouse; for a road led along their southern edge,
lined with telephone posts. A large flock of sheep was grazing between
the bluff and the trail, the most appropriate kind of stock for this
particular landscape.

While looking back at them, I noticed a curious trifle. The fence along
my road had good cedar posts, placed about fifteen feet apart. But at
one point there were two posts where one would have done. The wire, in
fact, was not fastened at all to the supernumerary one, and yet this
useless post was strongly braced by two stout, slanti