ing through the undergrowth,
the lizard glittering by the stone, the fish leaping in the stream, the
plaint of the whippoorwill, the call of the bluebird, the golden flash
of the oriole, the honk of the wild geese overhead, the whirr of the
mallard from the sedge. And, more than all, a human voice declaring by
its joy in song that not only God looks upon the world and finds it very
good.

CHAPTER I. "PIONEERS, O PIONEERS"

If you had stood on the borders of Askatoon, a prairie town, on the
pathway to the Rockies one late August day not many years ago, you would
have heard a fresh young human voice singing into the morning, as its
possessor looked, from a coat she was brushing, out over the "field of
the cloth of gold," which your eye has already been invited to see.
With the gift of singing for joy at all, you should be able to sing very
joyously at twenty-two. This morning singer was just that age; and if
you had looked at the golden carpet of wheat stretching for scores of
miles, before you looked at her, you would have thought her curiously in
tone with the scene. She was a symphony in gold--nothing less. Her hair,
her cheeks, her eyes, her skin, her laugh, her voice they were all gold.
Everything about her was so demonstratively golden that you might have
had a suspicion it was made and not born; as though it was unreal, and
the girl herself a proper subject of suspicion. The eyelashes were so
long and so black, the eyes were so topaz, the hair was so like such a
cloud of gold as would be found on Joan of Are as seen by a mediaeval
painter, that an air of faint artificiality surrounded what was in every
other way a remarkable effort of nature to give this region, where she
was so very busy, a keynote.

Poseurs have said that nature is garish or exaggerated more often than
not; but it is a libel. She is aristocratic to the nth degree, and
is never over done; courage she has, but no ostentation. There was,
however, just a slight touch of over-emphasis in this singing-girl's
presentation--that you were bound to say, if you considered her
quite apart from her place in this nature-scheme. She was not wholly
aristocratic; she was lacking in that high, social refinement which
would have made her gold not so golden, her black eyelashes not so
black. Being unaristocratic is not always a matter of birth, though it
may be a matter of parentage.

Her parentage was honest and respectable and not exalted. Her father had