ls in the circle of the eye. The ground appeared
bare and ill-treated, like a sheep first shorn; but yet nothing could
take away from it the look of plenty, even as the fat sides of the shorn
sheep invite the satisfied eye of the expert. The land now, all stubble,
still looked good for anything. If bare, it did not seem starved. It was
naked and unshaven; it was stripped like a boxer for the rubbing-down
after the fight. Not so refined and suggestive and luxurious as when it
was clothed with the coat of ripe corn in the ear, it still showed
the fibre of its being to no disadvantage. And overhead the joy of the
prairie grew apace.

September saw the vast prairie spaces around Askatoon shorn and
shrivelled of its glory of ripened grain, but with a new life come
into the air-sweet, stinging, vibrant life, which had the suggestion of
nature recreating her vitality, inflaming herself with Edenic strength,
a battery charging itself, to charge the world in turn with force and
energy. Morning gave pure elation, as though all created being must
strive; noon was the pulse of existence at the top of its activity;
evening was glamorous; and all the lower sky was spread with those
colours which Titian stole from the joyous horizon that filled his
eyes. There was in that evening light, somehow, just a touch of
pensiveness--the triste delicacy of heliotrope, harbinger of the Indian
summer soon to come, when the air would make all sensitive souls turn to
the past and forget that to-morrow was all in all.

Sensitive souls, however, are not so many as to crowd each other
unduly in this world, and they were not more numerous in Askatoon than
elsewhere. Not everybody was taking joy of sunrises and losing himself
in the delicate contentment of the sunset. There were many who took it
all without thought, who absorbed it unconsciously, and got something
from it; though there were many others who got nothing out of it at
all, save the health and comfort brought by a precious climate whose
solicitous friend is the sun. These heeded it little, even though a
good number of them came from the damp islands lying between the north
Atlantic and the German Ocean. From Erin and England and the land o'
cakes they came, had a few days of staring bright-eyed happy incredulity
as to the permanency of such conditions, and then settled down to take
it as it was, endless days of sunshine and stirring vivacious air--as
though they had always known it and had