s, but they had their nine hundred and sixty acres
proved up and wintered some ten horses and thirty head of cattle in a
sod and log stable. They had acquired what small ready cash they could
by selling oats and hay to newcomers. The hay they sold at four
dollars a ton, the oats at thirty cents a bushel. The boy I questioned
had all the characteristics of the overworked factory hand--abnormally
large forehead, cramped chest, half-developed limbs. Yet the health of
outdoor life glowed from his face, and he looked as if his muscles had
become knotted whipcords.

"Why do I think so many young Englishmen fail to make good settlers?"
he repeated, changing my question a little. "Because, up to a few
years ago, the wrong kind of people came. The only young Englishmen
who came up to a few years ago were no-goods, who had failed at home.
They were the kind of city scrubs who give up a job when it is hard and
then run for free meals at the soup kitchen. There aren't any soup
kitchens out here, and when they found they had to work before they
could eat, they cleared out and gave the country the blame. Men who
are out of work half the time at home get into the habit of depending
on charity keeping them. When you are a hundred miles from a railroad
town, there isn't any charity to keep you out here; you have to hustle
for yourself. But there is a different class of Englishmen coming now.
The men coming now have worked and want to work."

And yet--at another point a hundred miles from settlement I came on a
woman who belonged to that very type that ought never to emigrate. She
was a woman picked out of the slums by a charity organization. She had
presumably been scrubbed and curried and taught household duties before
being shipped in a famous colony to Canada. The colony went to pieces
in a deplorable failure on facing its first year of difficulties, but
she had married a Canadian frontiersman and remained. She wore all the
slum marks--bad teeth, loose-feeble-will in the mouth, furtive whining
eyes. She was clean personally and paraded her religion in unctuous
phrase; but I need only to tell a Canadian that she had lived in her
shanty three years and it was still bare of comfort as a biscuit box,
to explain why the Dominion regards this type as unsuitable for
pioneering. The American or Canadian wife of a frontiersman would have
had skin robes for rugs, biscuit boxes painted for bureaus, and chairs
hand-hewn out of r