, now swung far to the westward, facing the travellers over an
ocean of snow stretching away into the unknown. The day grew colder;
women and children drew blankets tighter about them, and huddled
lower in the sleighs to escape a sharp wind that slipped silently
down from the north, carrying a ground-drift of icy particles in its
breath.

Harris's thoughts were on his team, on the two cows trudging behind,
and on the multiplicity of arrangements which his new life would
present for decision and settlement. But his wife gazed silently out
over the ocean of snow. The rays of the sun fell gratefully on her
cheeks, pale and somewhat wan with her long journey. But the sun went
down, and the western sky, cloudless and measureless, faded from gold
to copper, and from copper to silver, and from silver to lead.
Turning uncomfortably in her crowded seat the girl could see, far
beyond the last of the teams, the road over which they had travelled,
stretching away until it lost itself, a point in the gathering
darkness. To the west it lost itself over the shoulder of the
prairie... The men had ceased to shout to each other; the cattle
plodded uncomplainingly; silently they moved in the midst of a
silence expanding into the infinite. It was her first sight of the
prairie, and a strange mixture of emotions, of awe, and loneliness,
and a certain indifference to personal consequences, welled up within
her. Once or twice she thought of home--a home so far away that it
might have been in another planet. But she would not let her mind
dwell on it for long. She was going to be brave. She had talked with
the other women on the train and in the town. They were women from
Ontario farms, some of them well into middle life, women who had
known the drudge of unremitting toil since childhood. Their speech
was faulty; their manners would not have passed muster amid her old
associations; but their quiet optimism was unbounded, their courage
was an inspiration. She too would be brave! For the sake of the brave
man who sat at her side, guiding his team in the deepening darkness;
for the sake of the new home that they two should build somewhere
over the horizon; for the sake of the civilization that was to be
planted, of the nation that must arise, of the manhood and womanhood
of to-morrow--she would be brave. Deep in her heart she swore she
would be brave, even while a recreant tear stole forth unbidden and
froze into a little pearl of pathos on her