training, of the fair-haired, gray-eyed, old Lancashire stock,
and had lost nothing by her sojourn on the prairie as youthful mistress of
Carrington Manor.

The land which ran west before us was not a pleasant one. Across its
horizon hung a pall of factory smoke; and unlovely hamlets, each with its
gaunt pit-head gear and stark brick chimney, sprinkled the bare fields
between, for hedgerows were scanty and fences of rusty colliery rope
replaced them. Yet it was a wealthy country, and bred keen-witted,
enterprising men, who, uncouth often in speech and exterior, possessed an
energy that has spread their commerce to the far corners of the earth.
That day the autumn haze wrapped a mellow dimness round its defects, but
Grace Carrington sighed as she turned toward me.

"I shall not be sorry to go home again," she said. "Perhaps I miss our
clear sunshine, but here everyone looks careworn in your dingy towns, and
there are so many poor. Besides, the monotony of those endless smoky
streets oppresses me. No, I should not care to come back to Lancashire."

Now, the words of a young and winsome woman seldom fall lightly on the
ears of a young man, and Grace spoke without affectation as one accustomed
to be listened to, which was hardly surprising in the heiress of
Carrington. As it happened, they wakened an answering echo within me. The
love of the open sky had been handed down to me through long generations
of a yeoman ancestry, and yet fate had apparently decreed that I should
earn my bread in the counting-house of a cotton-mill. It is probable that
I should have been abashed and awkward before this patrician damsel in a
drawing-room, but here, under the blue lift, with the brown
double-barrel--it was my uncle's new hammerless--across my knees, and the
speckled birds beneath, I felt in harmony with the surroundings, and
accordingly at ease. I was born and bred under the other edge of the
moor.

"It does not always rain here, though this has been a wet season, and
trade is bad," I said. "Will you tell me about Canada, Miss Carrington?"

Her eyes brightened as she answered: "It is my adopted country, and I love
it. Still it is no place for the weak and idle, for as they say out there,
we have no room for any but live men and strong. Yet, I never saw a ragged
woman nor heard of a hungry child. All summer the settlers work from dawn
to dusk under the clear sunshine of the open prairie, paying rent to no
one, for each tills his