e electrical devices that appear and re-appear in
the darkness like eyes that open and shut--wicked eyes that burn their
commercial message into my very soul. I am sick of these saucy,
swaggering streets and of sundry of the townspeople. Come you with me
and let us travel down the ways through the heart of the summer! We
shall have breeze and sun in our eyes, and breeze and sun in our
hearts. If you like not the prospect, pray, come no further, for we be
contrary the one to the other and no way-fellows.

As we climb on the train this morning, it seems as though our quest for
quiet is to be cheated by the wallowing wave of humanity that threatens
to submerge us. Who are these close-nudged folk and whither away?

She who runs may read them for hard-headed, white-handed men in search
of "prospects"; brown-throated homesteaders; real-estate agents out for
talking points and for snap fortunes; mining engineers with dunnage
bags--young fellows all in the full force of life--these, and "the
gang," who are ill-looking men and rather dirty. The gang fare forth
to work on the railway grades. They are always ganging--that is
going--for the words are strictly synonymous. The gang going to the
city meet the gang coming out. And so in everything they are
retroactive, and fight much, and swear, to give weight to their
differences of opinion. In one thing only is the gang agreed, no navvy
has yet been found who disputed the axiom that the Boss is a yellow
canine.

There is a sprinkling of women, too, and we talk to each other in the
friendly manner of the country. A couple of them are half-breed girls,
with drooping feathers and skirts that have a hiss. Surely their men
are industrious Indians. Both are cinched into their clothes like a
cayuse into its pack-saddle. Both have skin the colour of brown coffee
into which milk has been poured, and always they are fussing with their
pinned-on curls. "The judicious Hooker" once watched some women doing
this, and he said they were "a-dilling and burling their hair." No one
may ever hope to strike out a more apt expression. The younger of the
girls has an indiscreet mouth and desirous eyes. I should not be
surprised, if one of these times our little brown woman found these to
be a mortgage on her soul somewhat difficult of discharge. And the
usury, little woman, it troubles me, the usury!

The farmer's wife who shares my seat came to this province ten years
ago from the U