78 WHEAT AND WOMAN 



no wings should carry him where his feet might not 

 tread. He was far and away the most interesting 

 and fascinating intellectual personality that I 

 encountered in Canada, and in common with some 

 others among our most powerful thinkers he was 

 simple, clean-hearted, human, and kind. Upon 

 the altar of thought he had raised one of the 

 strongest friendships ever held fast between man 

 and man, and that with one of my neighbours, a 

 man of keen intellect and many acres, who lived 

 the unadorned life of a bachelor on the prairie. 

 The greater part of each available Sabbath was 

 passed with Sandy Stuart in the discussion of things 

 which matter, and the very last glimpse I caught of 

 him was in climbing the coulee on his short cut to 

 the little house wherein his brave, bright, and busy 

 mind found refreshment and inspiration in the 

 mind of another. Nor did his influence stop short 

 at the boundary of a kindred spirit. All the friends 

 of Sandy Stuart — typical old timers finding love and 

 life in the land in which they lived, and uniting in 

 a solemn hatred of class-distinction as the best word 

 they knew to express their innate sense of the dignity 

 and force of self-respect — men who would work 

 alongside Duke or Dukaboon, as man with man, using 

 the shibboleth of Dick, Tom, and Harry, raised their 

 hat in reverence to the claim of the master-mind. 

 " He'll be greatly missed," said one of the best 

 of them, my neighbour John McLeay, as we talked, 

 with the regret of those who lose, of the fine and 

 simple old man who had gone down east for a 

 holiday, after twenty years of survey work in the 

 North- West, and then in a brief moment of sleep 

 had crossed the horizon, - Eh," said the old High- 



