nickelled lamps. In
addition to the reek of it, the place was filled with the smell of hot
iron which an over-driven stove gives out, and the subtle odours of old
skin coats.

The guests, however, were accustomed to an atmosphere of that kind, and
it did not trouble them. For the most part, they were lean and spare,
bronzed by frost and snow-blink, and straight of limb, for, though
scarcely half of them were Canadian born, the prairie, as a rule,
swiftly sets its stamp upon the newcomer. There was also something in
the way they held themselves and put their feet down that suggested
health and vigour, and, in the case of most of them, a certain
alertness and decision of character. Some hailed from English cities,
a few from those of Canada, and some from the bush of Ontario; but
there was a similarity between them which the cut and tightness of
their store clothing did not altogether account for. They lived well
if plainly, and toiled out in the open unusually hard. Their eyes were
steady, their bronzed skin was clear, and their laughter had a
wholesome ring.

A fiery-haired Scot, a Highlander of the Isles, sat upon a barrel-head
sawing at a fiddle, and the shrill scream of it filled the barn. Tone
he did not aspire to, but he played with Caledonian verve and swing,
and kept the snapping time. It was mad, harsh music of the kind that
sets the blood tingling and the feet to move in rhythm, though the
exhilarating effect of it was rather spoiled by the efforts of the
little French Canadian who had another fiddle and threw in clanging
chords upon the lower strings.

They were dancing in the cleared space what was presumably a quadrille,
though it bore almost as great a resemblance to a Scottish country
dance, or indeed to one of the measures of Bretonne France, which was,
however, characteristic of the country. The Englishman has set no
distinguishable impress upon the prairie. It has absorbed him with his
reserve and sturdy industry, and the Canadian from the cities is
apparently lost in it, too, for theirs is the leaven that works through
the mass slowly and unobtrusively, and it is the Scot and the habitant
of French extraction who have given the life of it colour and
individuality. Extremes meet and fuse on the wide white levels of the
West.

It was, however, an Englishman who was the life of that dance, and he
was physically a bigger man than most of the rest, for as a rule, at
least, the Colonial born