lift one with a single motion to the level of a
well-filled hay-cart.

Charles Eugene pulled gallantly between the shafts; the cart was
swallowed up in the barn, stopped beside the mow, and once again the
forks were plunged into the hard-packed hay, raised a thick mat of
it with strain of wrist and back, and unloaded it to one side. By
the end of the week the hay, well-dried and of excellent colour, was
all under cover; the men stretched themselves and took long breaths,
knowing the fight was over and won.

"It may rain now if it likes," said Chapdelaine. "It will be all
the same to us." But it appeared that the sunshine had not been
timed with exact relation to their peculiar needs, for the wind held
in the north-west and fine days followed one upon the other in
unbroken succession.

The women of the Chapdelaine household had no part in the work of
the fields. The father and his three tall sons, all strong and
skilled in farm labour, could have managed everything by themselves;
if they continued to employ Legare and to pay him wages it was
because he had entered their service eleven years before, when the
children were young, and they kept him now, partly through habit,
partly because they were loth to lose the help of so tremendous a
worker. During the hay-making then, Maria and her mother had only
their usual tasks: housework, cooking, washing and mending, the
milking of three cows and the care of the hens, and once a week the
baking which often lasted well into the night.

On the eve of a baking Telesphore was sent to hunt up the bread-pans
which habitually found their way into all comers of the house and
shed-being in daily use to measure oats for the horse or Indian corn
for the fowls, not to mention twenty other casual purposes they were
continually serving. By the time all were routed out and scrubbed
the dough was rising, and the women hastened to finish other work
that their evening watch might be shortened.

Telesphore made a blazing fire below the Oven with branches of gummy
cypress that smelled of resin, then fed it with tamarack logs,
giving a steady and continuous heat. When the oven was hot enough,
Maria slipped in the pans of dough; after which nothing remained but
to tend the fire and change the position of the pans as the baking
required.

Too small an oven had been built five years before, and ever since
then the family did not escape a weekly discussion about the new
oven it was imperative