ture and able manhood had come to him in the West.
He would never lose it now, however far eastward he might travel.
But--the West and the good folk tugged pretty hard at his heart-strings,
as from the rear platform of his car on the east-bound train he watched
the waving stiff-brimmed hats of his comrades, and a little later the
last of the roofs of Saskatchewan's capital fading out in the distance.

Hard land as many have found it, hard though it had been in many ways
for Dick, the North-west had forced its bracing, stimulating spirit into
his being and made him the man he was, just so surely as the northland
wilderness had made of Jan the wonderful hound he now was.

And Dick left it all with a swelling heart; not unwillingly, because he
was going to a great promised happiness, but with a swelling heart none
the less, and a kind of mistiness of vision, due in great measure to the
real respect, the sincere gratitude he felt toward the land and life and
people who had helped him to make of himself a very much bigger and
better man than any previous efforts of his had promised to evolve out
of the same material in Sussex, for example.

Winter ruled still in the land, and so the actual seaboard--Halifax--and
not the big St. Lawrence port, was rail-head for Dick and Jan. But for
Jan the enforced confinement of the journey was greatly softened by
regular daily visits from his lord. And in Halifax two and a half days
of almost unbroken companionship awaited them before their steamer left.

This homeward journey was a totally different matter for Jan from the
outward trip. It was true he gave no thought to England as yet. But he
perfectly understood the general idea of travel. He knew that he and his
lord were on a journey together, that certain temporary separations were
an unavoidable feature of this sort of traveling, and that, the journey
done, the two of them would come together again. The sum of Jan's
knowledge, his reasoning powers, and his faculties of observation and
deduction were a hundredfold greater now than at the time of his
departure from England.

Jan loathed the close confinement of his life at sea, but he did not
rebel against it, neither was he cast down by it. He knew that it was to
be no more than a brief interlude, and he understood quite well that
though, unfortunately, men-folk had so arranged things that he must be
kept out of sight of his sovereign, save during those daily intervals of
delight