94 DEEP FURROWS 



at Beaverton Fve 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 whale- 

 bone 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' commis- 

 sion company for handling the farmers' grain sounded 

 like a very satisfactory solution of a very unsatisfac- 

 tory 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. 



