ard.

The colossal barn was finished. Its freshly white-washed sides glared
intolerably in the sun, but its interior was as yet innocent of paint
and through the yawning vent of the sliding doors came a delicious
odour of new, fresh wood and shavings. A crowd of men--Annixter's farm
hands--were swarming all about it. Some were balanced on the topmost
rounds of ladders, hanging festoons of Japanese lanterns from tree
to tree, and all across the front of the barn itself. Mrs. Tree, her
daughter Hilma and another woman were inside the barn cutting into long
strips bolt after bolt of red, white and blue cambric and directing
how these strips should be draped from the ceiling and on the walls;
everywhere resounded the tapping of tack hammers. A farm wagon drove
up loaded to overflowing with evergreens and with great bundles of
palm leaves, and these were immediately seized upon and affixed as
supplementary decorations to the tri-coloured cambric upon the inside
walls of the barn. Two of the larger evergreen trees were placed on
either side the barn door and their tops bent over to form an arch. In
the middle of this arch it was proposed to hang a mammoth pasteboard
escutcheon with gold letters, spelling the word WELCOME. Piles of
chairs, rented from I.O.O.F. hall in Bonneville, heaped themselves in
an apparently hopeless entanglement on the ground; while at the far
extremity of the barn a couple of carpenters clattered about the
impromptu staging which was to accommodate the band.

There was a strenuous gayety in the air; everybody was in the best of
spirits. Notes of laughter continually interrupted the conversation
on every hand. At every moment a group of men involved themselves in
uproarious horse-play. They passed oblique jokes behind their hands
to each other--grossly veiled double-meanings meant for the women--and
bellowed with laughter thereat, stamping on the ground. The relations
between the sexes grew more intimate, the women and girls pushing the
young fellows away from their sides with vigorous thrusts of their
elbows. It was passed from group to group that Adela Vacca, a division
superintendent's wife, had lost her garter; the daughter of the foreman
of the Home ranch was kissed behind the door of the dairy-house.

Annixter, in execrable temper, appeared from time to time, hatless, his
stiff yellow hair in wild disorder. He hurried between the barn and the
ranch house, carrying now a wickered demijohn, now a