ny work of man, was
pierced and broken with elevators, villages, and farm buildings, and
the whiff of coal smoke was blown down the air which had so lately
known only the breath of the prairies. The wild goose no longer
loitered in the brown fields in spring and autumn, and the wild duck
had sought the safety of the little lakes. The pioneer days had
passed away, and civilization and prosperity were rampant in the
land. There were those, too, who thought that perhaps the country had
lost something in all its gaining; that perhaps there was less
idealism and less unreckoning hospitality in the brick house on the
hill than there once had been in the sod shack In the hollow.

Mary Harris hurried about her capacious kitchen, deep in the
preparation of the evening meal. The years had taken toll of the
freshness of her young beauty; the shoulders, in mute testimony to
much hard labour of the hands, had drooped forward over the deepening
chest; the hair was thinner, and farther back above the forehead, and
streaked with grey at the temples; the mouth lacked the rosy
sensuousness of youth, and sat now in a mould, half of resolution,
half submission. Yet her foot had lost little of its sprightliness,
and the sympathy in her fine eyes seemed to have deepened with the
years.

A moist but appetizing steam rose from the vegetable pots on the
range, and when she threw back the iron door to feed more coal the
hot glow from within danced a reflection along the bright row of
utensils hanging from the wall, and even sought out the brass plate
on the cream separator at the far end of the big room. Through the
screen door came the monotonously redundant clic...a...clank of the
windmill, and a keen ear might have caught the light splash of water
as it fell in the wooden horse-troughs from the iron nozzle of the
pump.

Mary stuck a fork in a potato to ascertain if the "bone" was all
gone, meanwhile shielding her face from the steam with the pot lid,
held aloft in an aproned hand. Having satisfied herself that the meal
was making satisfactory progress, she stepped to the door and sent a
quick look across the fields, to where a streak of black smoke was
scrawled along the sky.

"Beulah," she called, turning toward the interior part of the house.
"Come, Beulah, set the table. They're coming from the field."

In a moment a girl of twenty, plainly attired in a neat calico dress,
entered the kitchen. She was fresh and beautiful as her mothe