burnt over twenty-eight
acres. In making these fires, there is a kind of madness that takes
possession of you so that you pay no heed to the shrivelling of your
shoes; to the scalding cinders on your hands; or the inky blackness of
your face and clothes. Indeed, it would not be surprising to
ultimately learn that the direful task assigned to Lucifer is not
wholly without its compensations.

At long intervals, we pass fat little shacks that spread over the land
instead of stretching up. At one of these, we stop to get cold water
in the engine.

"Any news moving?" asks the bachelor who is overlord to the shack.

He does not wait for an answer, but proceeds to inform us that the
prime knowledge a man needs for homesteading is the art of cooking in a
frying pan.

His homestead is a ranch; not a rawnch. The difference, he explains,
is that the former pays sometimes; the latter never.

He very kindly invites me to see his swineyard, the special pride of
which is a heavy thoroughbred called "Artful Belle" ... O la! la! la!

As he upholsters his pipe with a stuffing of cut-plug, her master would
have me observe that Belle's face is "dished" and that her eyes are
free from wrinkles of surrounding fat. Indeed Belle is no waddling,
commonplace sow; no mere animated lard keg, for she has been bred to
the purple with great care.

"A bacon hog?" I ask.

"Yes, madam," he replies, "but in order that her bacon may be of the
desired streakiness I feed and starve her alternately."

It makes a vast difference to a sow whether her ears stand up or lie
down. Belle's ears are 'pliable' and 'silky.' Her hair doesn't comb
straight either, but tends to swirls and cowlicks which are
proof-positive of her blue blood in the same way that a cold nose is in
a woman.

I made a grave error, too, in speaking of Belle as red. Every swine
husbandman knows the technical word for her particular colour is
"mahogany." She has already farrowed two litters of six, the members
of which inherit their mother's fatal beauty. He tells me other things
but I forget them, except that pigs can see the wind, and that they are
older than history.

We take a photograph of this bachelor homesteader and promise to print
it in a city paper under the caption, 'Wife Wanted.' In the North, we
call a bachelor, 'an anxious one.'

The last miles of our journey are heavy going because of the hills and
stones, and our motor makes a lugubrious noise internal