s a limit to the
sensations we can digest, just as there is a limit to the meat we can
digest. And out here we have a tendency to bolt more than is good for
us, to bolt it without pausing to get the true taste of it. The women
of this town remind me more and more of mice in an oxygen bell; they
race round and round, drunk with an excitement they can't quite
understand, until they burn up their little lives the same as the mice
burn up their little lungs.

... I've had a letter from Whinstane Sandy to-day, writing about
seed-wheat and the repairs for the tractor. It seems like a message
from another world. He reports that poor old Scotty is eating again
and no longer mourns day in and day out for his lost master. And Mr.
Ketley has very kindly brought over the liniment for Mudski's
shoulder. ... Whatever I may be, or whatever I may have done, I feel
that I can still cleanse my heart by sacrifice.

_Friday the Ninth_

One can get out of the habit, apparently, of having children about. My
kiddies, I begin to see, occasionally grate on Duncan. He brought
tears to the eyes of Pauline Augusta yesterday by the way he scolded
her for using a lead-pencil on the living-room woodwork. And the night
before he shouted much strong language at Elmer for breaking a
window-pane in the garage with Benny McArthur's new air-gun.

Elmer and his father, I'm afraid, have rather grown away from each
other. More than once I've caught Duncan staring at his son and heir
in a puzzled and a slightly frustrated sort of way. And Elmer's soul
promptly becomes _incommunicado_ when his iron-browed pater is in the
neighborhood.

Duncan is very proud of his grand new house. He is anxious to build a
conservatory out along the southwest wing. But he has asked how long a
conservatory would last with two young mountain-goats gamboling along
its leads.... Lossie, little suspecting the pang she was giving me,
laughingly showed me a manuscript which she found by accident in my
Dinkie's reader. It was a poem, dedicated to "D. O'L." And written in
a stiff little hand I read:

"Your lips are lined with roses,
Your eyes they shinne like gold
If you call me from the sunlight,
I'll answer from the cold.
But I wonder why, Oh, why,
You stay so far from me?
If you whisper from the prarrie,
I'll call from