mes when my Dinky-Dunk, for all
his bigness and strength, has to be taken sedately in tow, the same as a
racing automobile has to be hauled through the city streets by a dinky
little low-power hack-car!

_Saturday the Tenth_

We've had a cold spell, with heavy frosts at night, but the days are
still glorious. The overcast days are so few in the West that I've been
wondering if the optimism of the Westerners isn't really due to the
sunshine they get. Who could be gloomy under such golden skies? Every
pore of my body has a throat and is shouting out a _Tarentella Sincera_
of its own! But it isn't the weather that has keyed me up this time.
It's another wagon-load of supplies which Olie teamed out from Buckhorn
yesterday. I've got wall-paper and a new iron bed for the annex, and
galvanized wash-tubs and a crock-churn and storm-boots and enough
ticking to make ten big pillows, and unbleached linen for two dozen
slips--I love a big pillow--and I've been saving up wild-duck feathers
for weeks, the downiest feathers you ever sank your ear into, Matilda
Anne; and if pillows will do it I'm going to make this house look like a
harem! Can you imagine a household with only three pillow-slips, which
had to be jerked off in the morning, washed, dried and ironed and put
back on their three lonely little pillows before bedtime? Well, there
will be no more of that in this shack.

But the important news is that I've got a duck-gun, the duckiest
duck-gun you ever saw, and waders, and a coon-skin coat and cap and a
big leather school-bag for wearing over my shoulder on Paddy. The coat
and cap are like the ones we used to laugh at when we went up to
Montreal for the tobogganing, in the days when I was young and foolish
and willing to sacrifice comfort on the altar of outward appearances.
The coon-skins make me look like a Laplander, but they'll be mighty
comfy when the cold weather comes, for Dinky-Dunk says it drops to forty
and fifty below, sometimes.

I also got a lot of small stuff I'd written for from the mail-order
house, little feminine things a woman simply _has_ to have. But the big
thing was the duck-gun.

I no longer get heart failure when I hear the whir of a
prairie-chicken, but drop my bird before it's out of range. Poor, plump,
wounded, warm-bodied little feathery things! Some of them keep on flying
after they've been shot clean through the body, going straight on for a
couple of hundred feet, or even more, and