CHAPTER Vn 



Stumps and Snake-fences 



TN this chapter I propose to tell something of 

 ■■■ the farm of earlier days — not the bush farm, 

 btit shortly afterward, when it was bounded with 

 rail-fences and had some stumps on it in the back 

 fields. The V-drag and the old ox-team had almost 

 vanished in my youthful days but, I remember the 

 former was still on the premises. I am not giving 

 up my claim, however, to having a knowledge of 

 the ox. It happened thus: My father bought a 

 farm adjoining our homestead and on this was an 

 old beaver meadow of some thirty or forty acres. 

 This meadow had growing on it clumps of willows, 

 of several varieties, and he secured a yoke of oxen 

 to remove these. With a log-chain and that yoke 

 of oxen those acres of willows were rudely torn 

 from the soil and hauled into heaps and burned. 

 Through the centre of that beaver meadow a creek 

 meandered with many a curve and there were 

 muskrats and mink innumerable along that stream. 

 The meadow was alive with song-birds and there 

 were also partridge and rabbits in numbers. In a 

 pond formed by one of several beaver dams and 

 fringed with willows, wild-ducks made their home. 

 There were not so many hunters about in those 



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