good feed of oats and wild hay,
and the birds will waken you in the morning."

The northern lights leaped into the sky just as I turned from this
east-west grade, north again, across a high bridge, to the last road
that led home. To the right I saw a friendly light, and a dog's barking
voice rang over from the still, distant farmstead. I knew the place. An
American settler with a French sounding name had squatted down there a
few years ago.

The road I followed was, properly speaking, not a road at all, though
used for one. A deep master ditch had been cut from ten or twelve miles
north of here; it angled, for engineering reasons, so that I was going
northwest again. The ground removed from the ditch had been dumped along
its east side, and though it formed only a narrow, high, and steep dam,
rough with stones and overgrown with weeds, it was used by whoever had
to go north or south here. The next east-west grade which I was aiming
to reach, four miles north, was the second correction line that I had
to use, twenty-four miles distant from the first; and only a few hundred
yards from its corner I should be at home!

At home! All my thoughts were bent on getting home now. Five or six
hours of driving will make the strongest back tired, I am told. Mine is
not of the strongest. This road lifted me above the things that I liked
to watch. Invariably, on all these drives, I was to lose interest here
unless the stars were particularly bright and brilliant. This night I
watched the lights, it is true: how they streamed across the sky, like
driving rain that is blown into wavy streaks by impetuous wind. And they
leaped and receded, and leaped and receded again. But while I watched, I
stretched my limbs and was bent on speed. There were a few particularly
bad spots in the road, where I could not do anything but walk the
horse. So, where the going was fair, I urged him to redoubled effort. I
remember how I reflected that the horse as yet did not know we were so
near home, this being his first trip out; and I also remember, that
my wife afterwards told me that she had heard me a long while before I
came--had heard me talking to the horse, urging him on and encouraging
him.

Now I came to a slight bend in the road. Only half a mile! And sure
enough: there was the signal put out for me. A lamp in one of the
windows of the school--placed so that after I turned in on the yard, I
could not see it--it might have blinded my eye, and t