w-bound ranges, under the bitter alkali dust, and deep in the smoking
canyons through which we carried the new steel highway.

Failures, probably their friends called them at home, but in this their
friends were wrong. With light jest, or grim silent endurance, they
played out the lost game to the bitter end, and laid the foundations of a
great country's prosperity, while if fate or fortune has favors for but
the few, those who receive them should remember with becoming humility
what otherwise they might have been. So the past comes back, struggle,
disappointment, and slow success, at last, until it is a relief when Harry
Lorraine strides laughing in and Grace fills for him a great polished horn
of cider.

"Here's success to your story! Tell them simply how we live and work, and
some of us, the best, have died in this land," he says. Then he raises the
horn high toward the rafters and I know his meaning. It is a way the
forerunners of civilization--axe-man, paddle-man, and railroad
shoveler--had, and he did it in memory of one who lies far off among the
northern snows. Taking up the weary pen as he and Grace go out together I
prepare to follow his counsel, telling the story simply and as it happened
from the beginning.

LORIMER OF THE NORTHWEST

CHAPTER I

THE FIRST SOWING

It was late in autumn, and the heather had faded into dingy brown, though
long streaks of golden fern crept winding down, when Grace Carrington
first talked with me of the Canadian Dominion on the bleak slopes of
Starcross Moor. There was a hollow in the hillside where a few
pale-stemmed birches and somber firs formed, as it were, a rampart between
the poor, climbing meadows and the waste of gorse and fern, and we two
beneath them seemed utterly alone in the moorland solitude.

Grace sat on a lichened boulder with the sunlight upon her, gazing down
across the levels of Lancashire. I was just twenty years old, and she
seemed the incarnation of all that was fresh and good in early womanhood.
Still, it was not only her beauty that attracted me, though she was the
well-dowered daughter of a race which has long been famous for fair women,
but a certain grave dignity that made her softly spoken wishes seem
commands that it would be a pleasure to obey. Grace was nineteen then, and
she lived in Western Canada with her widowed father, Colonel Carrington,
who had made himself a power in that country. Yet she was English by birth
and early