chooner, I felt a bit ridiculous as Tokudo impassively
carried our belongings out to the canvas-covered wagon and Poppsy and
I climbed aboard. The good citizens of American Hill stared after us
as we rumbled down through the neatly boulevarded streets, and I felt
suspiciously like a gypsy-queen who'd been politely requested by the
local constabulary to move on.

It wasn't until we reached the open country that my spirits revived.
Then the prairie seemed to reach out its hand to me and give me peace.
We camped, that first night, in the sheltering arm of a little coulee
threaded by a tiny stream. We cooked bacon and eggs and coffee while
Whinnie out-spanned his team and put up his tent.

I sat on an oat-sack, after supper, with Poppsy between my knees,
watching the evening stars come out. They were worlds, I remembered,
some of them worlds perhaps with sorrowing men and women on them. And
they seemed very lonely and far-away worlds, until I heard the drowsy
voice of my Poppsy say up through the dusk: "In two days more, Mummy,
we'll be back to Dinkie, won't we?"

And there was much, I remembered, for which a mother should be
thankful.

_Sunday the Fourteenth_

_Dark, and true, and tender is the North._ Heaven bless the rhymster
who first penned those words. Spring is stealing hack to the prairie,
and our world is a world of beauty. The sky to-day is windrowed with
flat-bottomed cumulus-clouds, tier beyond tier above a level plane of
light, marking off the infinite distance like receding mile-stones on
a world turned over on its back. Occasionally the outstretched head of
a wild duck, pumping north with a black throb of wings, melts away to
a speck in the opaline air. Back among the muskeg reeds the waders are
courting and chattering, and early this morning I heard the plaintive
winnowing call-note of the Wilson snipe, and later the _punk-e-lunk_
love-cry of a bittern to his mate. There's an eagle planing in lazy
circles high in the air, even now, putting a soft-pedal on the noise
of the coots and grebes as he circles over their rush-lined cabarets.
And somewhere out on the range a bull is lowing. It is the season of
love and the season of happiness. Dinkie and Poppsy and I are going
out to gather prairie-crocuses. They are thick now in the prairie-sod,
soft blue and lavender and sometimes mauve. We must dance to the
vernal saraband while we can: Spring is so short in this norland
country of ours. It comes lat