raight in the face, her swollen eyes
telling their own story, and repeated deliberately, "you big coward."

Allan bit his lip. "You're about the only person, Beulah, that could
say that and get off with whole skin. I suppose he told you I hit him
before he was on his feet."

"Well, he didn't. He didn't say you hit him at all, but he couldn't
deny it, so we knew the truth. And we knew you must have taken some
mean advantage, or you'd never have got near enough to leave a mark
on him."

"Jim's quite a hero, all right. It's too bad he's gone."

"It's a good job he's gone," said Harris. "By the way Beulah talks
things have gone far enough. I don't want my daughter marrying a
farmer."

"Her grandmother's daughter did," said Mary Harris.

"Yes, I know, but things are different now. I look for something
better for Beulah."

It was characteristic of Harris, as of thousands of others, that,
although a farmer himself, he looked for "something better" for his
daughter. He was resigned to Allan being a farmer; his intimate,
daily relationship with his son shrank from, any possibility of
separation. But for his daughter--no. He had mapped out no career for
her; she might marry a doctor, lawyer, merchant, tradesman, even a
minister, but not a farmer. It is a peculiarity of the agriculturist
that, among all professions, he holds his own in the worst repute. As
a class he has educated himself to believe that everybody else makes
an easy living off the farmer, and, much as he may revile the present
generation for doing so, he is anxious that his children should join
in the good picking. In later years has come a gradually broadening
conception that farming, after all, calls for brain as well as
muscle, and that the man who can wrestle a successful living from
Nature has as much right to hold up his head in the world as the
experimenter in medicine or the lawyer playing hide-and-seek with
Justice through the cracks in the Criminal Code. Herein is a germ of
the cityward migration: the farmer himself is looking for "something
better" for his children.

"Jim was a good man," persisted his wife. "Don't you think you
were--well, perhaps, a little hasty with him?"

Harris sat back. It was his wife's business to agree. For twenty
years and more she had been faithful in the discharge of that duty.
That she should suggest an opinion out of harmony with his indicated
a lack of discipline, not very serious, perhaps, but a seed which, if