Homesteading 



so this season. Our available capital was get- 

 ting very low, and as two of our neighbours wanted 

 our help in shocking, we arranged with them 

 for one to cut our wheat and the other our oats. 

 A binder is an expensive machine, costing some 

 hundred and forty dollars, and would be lying 

 by all the year except two or three weeks ; more- 

 over, though it can be worked by oxen it would 

 need four, and we had only two, and they are 

 much more troublesome and slower than horses 

 for the cumbrous machine. 



The season had been so good that some men 

 who had a southern slope were already cutting, 

 even at the risk of shrinkage of grain from its 

 not being quite ripe, so anxious were they to 

 avoid danger from frost. Though the days 

 were hot, we knew the freezing-point was nearly 

 reached on several nights of clear moon- 

 light. 



It is said to need six or seven degrees of frost 

 to do much harm, and, of course, as the grain 

 passes from the milky stage into the hard kernel 

 the danger passes too. Fortunately, the sky 

 became overcast during the dreaded days and 

 nights of the period of full moon. 



Now for two or three weeks men, women, and 

 the older children, horses, and oxen worked hard 

 from morning to night, and what had been 



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