leaving
much corn on the clean marges. He has a strong heart to wait with. The
geese "had him" when he first carried forth the corn, but it was a year
or two afterward before a daring young gander and pair made a hasty
drop. For once there was no chorus of "I-told-you-so's," from the wiser
heads cocked stiff as cattails from the low growth of the surrounding
fields. That was the second beginning.

The system has been cumulative ever since, and in something like this
order: fifteen, forty, one hundred and fifty, four hundred, six
hundred--in five years. The geese never land all at once in the
artificial pond--some watching as far back as from the remote wood-lot,
others in the south fields across the road. Jack Miner feeds five
bushels of corn a day and would like to feed fifteen.

"A rich man can afford a few geese," he remarked, "but it takes a poor
man to feed six hundred."

He asked the Canadian Government for one hundred dollars the year to
help feed the geese, but the formidable process entailed to get it
evidently dismayed Ottawa at the outset, for it didn't go through. An
automobile magnate came over from the States recently. The substance of
his call didn't leak out. In any event, Jack Miner is still managing
his brick-kiln. Bird-fanciers come nowadays in season from all over the
States and Provinces, and Jack feeds them too. Meantime, we Lake folk
who come early enough to the Shore to see the inspiring flocks flying
overland to the water in the beginnings of dusk, and hear them out on
the Lake where they moor at night, a bedtime music that makes for
strange dreaming--we know well what kind of a gift to the community Jack
Miner is; and we are almost as sorry as he, when the keen, hardy Norse
blood of the birds calls them forth from the May balm.

Of course, Jack is an individual. He has time to plant roses as well as
corn. At luncheon to-day, there was an armful of red roses on the table
from Jack Miner's. He had sent them three miles in hay time, and didn't
know that I had spent the morning in writing about his geese. He has
time to tempt thousands of smaller birds to his acreage. It's one
seething bird-song there. Besides, he makes a fine brick. You'd expect
him to be a workman.... But the wild geese are a part of his soul.

"I've watched them for a good many years now," he told me. "I've seen
them tackle a man, a bull, a team, and stand against the swoop of an
eagle. Two ganders may be hard as swordsmen