partners--all the Winnipeg dealers
know the firm of Lorimer & Lorraine, and how they send their wheat in by
special freight train. Then there is a stretch of raw breaking, and the
tinkle of the binders rises out of a hidden hollow, as tireless arms of
wood and steel pile up the sheaves of Jasper's crop--Jasper takes a
special pride in forestalling us. The dun smoke of a smudge-fire shows
that Harry is in prairie fashion protecting our stock, and I see it
drifting eastward across the dusty plain, with the cattle seeking shelter
from the mosquitoes under it.

The management of a farm like Fairmead is a serious task, even when there
are two to do it, and Grace says there are weighty responsibilities
attached. How many toilers in crowded Europe benefit by the cheap flour we
send them I do not know, though last year we kept the Winnipeg millers
busy; but when, in conjunction with a certain society, we opened new lands
and homes for the homeless poor--it was Grace's pet project--all those who
occupied them were not thankful. Some also stole their neighbors'
chickens, and the said neighbors abused us. Others seemed more inclined to
live on one another than to wrest a living from the soil, while once
Macdonald of the Northwest Police lodged a solemn protest, "We'll hold ye
baith responsible for the depredations o' the wastrels who're disturbing
the harmony o' this peaceful prairie."

Still, Harry and I were once poor enough ourselves, and with Grace's help
we have done our best to weed out the worthless--Harry attends to
this--and encourage the rest. Very many bushels of seed-wheat has Grace
given them, and here as elsewhere there are considerably more good than
bad, while already a certain society takes to itself the credit of the
flourishing Fairmead colony. Harry, however, says that undeserved
prosperity has made me an optimist. But the reader will wonder how I,
Ralph Lorimer, who landed in Canada with one hundred pounds' capital,
became owner of Fairmead and married Grace, only daughter and heiress of
Colonel Carrington. Well, that is a long story, and looking back at the
beginning of it instead of at the sunlit prairie I see a grimy
smoke-blackened land where gaunt chimneys stand in rows, and behind it the
bare moors of Lancashire. Then again the memories change like the glasses
of a kaleidoscope, and I sigh as I remember comrades who helped us in our
necessity and who now, forgotten by all save a few, sleep among the
sno