n a quiet way who did not know how to quit.

With four younger brothers and an equal number of younger sisters to
crowd up to the home table down there on the farm near Beaverton,
Ontario County, Ontario, it was advisable for the eldest son to work
out as a farm boy. He was thirteen years old when he first hired out
to a farmer for the summer and he was to receive twenty-four dollars
for the season. But the farmer had a hard time that year and at the
end of the summer--

"John," said the poor fellow with ill-concealed embarrassment, "I--I'm
afraid I can't pay you that money. But you know that big flock of
sheep down in the back pasture? Well, tell you what we'll do. Over at
Beaverton I've got an uncle who's a tailor. I can give you a suit of
full cloth of homespun and call it square," and though the boy wanted
the money for fifty things he had to take the homespun suit.

Three or four hobble-de-hoy years of it on the farms of the
neighborhood and young Kennedy literally took to the woods and drove
the rivers in Muskoka and Michigan as a lumberjack till he was a chunk
of whalebone in a red flannel shirt and corked boots and could pull the
whiskers out of a wild-cat! With varying success he fought the battle
of life and learned that many things glitter besides gold and that the
four-leafed clover in this life after all is a square deal between men.

The appeal of E. A. Partridge at the convention of the Manitoba Grain
Growers in 1906 therefore found John Kennedy feeling responsive. He
knew the unjust position in which the farmers were placed; for he was a
farmer himself--up in the Swan River Valley--and he was a delegate from
the Swan River Grain Growers' Association. The idea of forming a
farmers' commission company for handling the farmers' grain sounded
like a very satisfactory solution of a very unsatisfactory state of
affairs and he threw himself whole-heartedly into the campaign to sell
enough stock to obtain a charter.

Up in the newer part of the country, which was his own particular
territory, he found the farmers ready enough to listen; for they had
suffered up there from the evils at which the new movement was aiming.
He found also that the most interested members of his audiences were
men who could least afford to lose any money.

An effort was made to discredit the whole proposition as a political
move of the Conservative Party. Throughout the Swan River district,
the Dauphin district and all