an had reached the refrain:

"Home, home, sweet, sweet home--."

As he folded her passionately in his arms she drew his face down to
hers and said, with the happy light still glowing and beautifying her
face: "We will take it as a good omen; to us, now, there shall be no
place like home, shall there, dear?"

As he looked into her eyes he answered by lovingly repeating the
refrain which was now dying softly away in the distance:

"Home, home, sweet, sweet home--."

* * * * *

A Prairie Episode.

The fierce rays of the sun, which had turned the prairie grass into a
lifeless-looking dusty brown, continued to pour pitilessly down on the
horde of perspiring workmen, exhausted Indian ponies, and long-eared
morose mules.

At intervals, gusts of hot parching winds bent the rank grass, which
gave forth a dry, almost rasping sound, very different from its usual
musical rustle.

"In ten minutes more it will be noon, and we can get out of this into
the shade for an hour," said Joe Swan, a huge muscular laborer, as he
pushed the nose of the steel scraper into the earth.

The words were addressed to a pale-faced young man who was driving the
pair of mules hitched to the scraper. The only reply was a tired tug
on the reins, and the next moment the scraper had torn up half a yard
of the tenacious prairie sod and cast it to one side. As he turned the
mules around to get them into position again, Joe glanced covertly at
the weary face, shook his head in a troubled manner, and muttered, "It
ain't the work that's breaking him up like this; it's her, and it's
going to end in trouble long before we reach the Rockies."

It was a strange, almost fantastic life these two men, with hundreds
of others, were leading away out here on the vast prairie, whose long
solitude was now being broken by the babel that attends track-laying,
and whose vast bosom, for the first time, was being girded with a band
of steel which was to connect the Atlantic with the Pacific, and bring
home most forcibly to the Mother Country the value of her great
Canadian colony.

Stretching away in front of and behind the two men were hundreds of
other scrapers, tearing up the sod, while closely following them came
gangs of track-layers, who laid the ties and fastened the rails to
them as quickly as the sod was removed. It was easy work track-laying
on the flat expanse, where grading for hundreds of miles at a stretc