were in the whole Plainville settlement the first two or three
years."

"I got more neighbours, too," interjected the girl. Then springing
up, she stood behind her father's chair and put her arm around his
neck.

"Don't be cross, Dad," she whispered. "Your heart's in the right
place--but a long way in."

He disengaged her, gently enough. As Beulah said, his heart was all
right, but a long way in. Twenty-five years of pitched battle with
circumstances--sometimes in victory, sometimes in defeat, but never
in despair; always with a load of expense about him, always with the
problem of income and outlay to be solved--had made of Harris a man
very different from the young idealist of '82. During the first years
of struggle for a bare existence in some way the flame of idealism
still burned, but with the dawn of the "better times" there came a
gradual shifting of standards and a new conception of essentials. At
first the settlers attached little value to their land; it was free
for the taking, and excited no envy among them. The crops of the
early years were unprofitable on account of the great distance to
market; later, when the railway came to their doors, the crops were
still unprofitable, owing to falling prices and diminishing yields
due to poor cultivation. Then came a decade during which those who
stayed in the country stayed because they could not get out, and it
became a current saying that the more land a man farmed the deeper he
got in debt. Homesteads were abandoned; settlers flew by night
"across the line" or to more distant districts to begin their fight
over again. And yet, in some way, Harris kept his idealism amid all
the adversity in which the community was steeped; reverses could
neither crush his spirit nor deflect it from its ambitions.

Then came the swing of the pendulum. No one knows just what started
it prosperity-wards. Some said it was that the farmers, disheartened
with wheat-growing, were applying themselves to stock, and certain it
is that in "mixed farming" the community eventually found its
salvation; others attributed the change to improved agricultural
implements, to improved methods of farming, to greater knowledge of
prairie conditions, to reductions in the cost of transportation and
enlarged facilities for marketing, or to increasing world demand and
higher world prices for the product of the farm. But whatever the
causes--and no doubt all of the above contributed--the fact graduall