esently."

In this, however, she was wrong. They were not rough to look at, for
though it was plain to see that both toiled hard for a bare living there
was a light-hearted contentment about them, and a curious something that
seemed akin to refinement. It was not educational polish, but rather a
natural courtesy and self-respect, though the words do not adequately
express it, which seems born of freedom, and an instinctive realization of
the brotherhood of man expressed in kindly action. Hard-handed and
weather-beaten, younger son of good English family or plowman born, as I
was afterward to find, the breakers of the prairie are rarely barbaric in
manners or speech, and, in the sense of its inner meaning, most of them
are essentially gentlemen.

It was with a lighter heart and many good wishes that I rode out again,
and eventually reached Coombs' homestead, where a welcome of a different
kind awaited me. The house was well built of sawn lumber, and backed by a
thin birch bluff, while there was no difficulty in setting down its owner
as an Englishman of a kind that fortunately is not common. He was stout
and flabby in face, with a smug, self-satisfied air I did not like.
Leaning against a paddock rail, he looked me over while I told him what
had brought me there. Then he said, with no trace of Western accent,
which, it afterward appeared, he affected to despise:

"You should not have borrowed that horse, because if we come to terms I
shall have to feed him a day or two. Of course you would be useless for
several months at least, and with the last one I got a premium. However,
as a favor I'll take you until after harvest for your board."

"What are the duties?" I asked cautiously. And he answered:

"Rise at dawn, feed the working cattle, and plow until the
dinner-hour--when you learn how. Then you could water the stock while
you're resting; plow, harrow, or chop wood until supper; after that, wash
up supper dishes, and--it's standing order--attend family prayers. In
summer you'll continue hay cutting until it's dark."

Now the inhabitants of eastern Lancashire and the West Riding are seldom
born foolish, and Jasper had cautioned me. So it may have been native
shrewdness that led to my leaving the draft for one hundred pounds intact
at the Winnipeg office of the Bank of Montreal and determining to earn
experience and a living at the same time as promptly as possible. Also,
though I did not discover it until later, thi