h she knew that in western Canada
the smaller settlers as a rule stripped themselves of every comfort,
and lived in the most grim simplicity, that they might have more to
give the land.

Then, as the man did not answer, Weston solemnly laid down his fork,
with the manner of one making a painful sacrifice.

"There is a good deal of nonsense talked about farming in these days,"
he observed authoritatively. "You can put a fortune into drains and
fences and buildings, but it's quite another matter to get two or
three per cent, upon it back. In the old days I hadn't a horse in the
stables worth less than sixty guineas, and my father thought nothing
of giving twice as much. The other things were to match." He looked
down the table with a flush of indignation in his heavy face. "Now,
Walters at the George gives a navvy the horse I hired. Still, what can
you expect when they pile up the taxes on us, and open new doors
continually to the foreigners? We grew wheat at Scarthwaite, and it
was ground at Ramside mill. The last time I looked in, Harvey had his
stores full of flour from Minneapolis and Winnipeg. I asked him
whether he didn't feel ashamed of having any hand in that kind of
thing."

Ida could not check a smile. In Weston's case, at least, the reason
why western wheat had displaced the local product was tolerably plain.
This full-fleshed man differed, she fancied, in most essentials from
the lean farmers who drove the half-mile furrows, or ripped up their
patches of virgin sod with plodding oxen on the vast expanses of the
prairie. While he indulged his senses and bought sixty-guinea horses,
they rose at four or earlier, and, living on pork and flour and green
tea, worked in grim earnest until it was dark. Blizzard and hail and
harvest frost brought them to the verge of ruin now and then but could
not drive them over it. They set their lips, cut down the grocery
bill, and, working still harder, went on again. A good many of them
had, as she knew, come from England.

Then Weston appeared to remember his dinner, and made a little vague
gesture which seemed to indicate that there was no more to be said.

"I don't want to hear about drains and deeper tillage while we let
every foreigner pour his wheat and chilled beef into our market. It's
nonsense," he asserted.

Some one started another topic; and an hour or so later most of the
little party strolled out on the terrace in front of the house. It was
almost dark now,