HARVEST OF MY FIRST SEEDING 221 



plating matrimony as he was sowing lawn grass in 

 front of the shack, and he added that after the 

 ceremony had taken place the shack would hardly 

 continue to be free quarters for bachelors, nor 

 would ducks be any longer cooked in butter. 

 Roddy McMahon's sister was cooking for the 

 threshers, because Danny McLeay didn't marry 

 until the next year, when the shack grew to a four- 

 roomed cottage and became the cleanest, neatest, and 

 most comfortable prairie home I saw in Canada. 



" It's good wheat all right," he said, " as we 

 leaned over the top-bar of his roofless granary, 

 but I should have been away ahead if I had stacked 

 before the rain came. But it's going to be a better 

 yield than I looked for ! " 



The outfit came on to me a few days later, just 

 twenty-four hours before I expected them. At 

 three-thirty Nancy was objecting to carry sausages, 

 roasting meat, and the crockery which in those 

 days the Hudson Bay Company, under the chief 

 factorship of Mr. Archibald Macdonald, made a 

 sportsmanlike practice, worthy of the business 

 enterprise and tradition of the " Adventurers of 

 England," of lending to their customers for the 

 festival of threshing without charge, and at six- 

 thirty I had to feed fifteen hungry men. 



" My ! and no woman to help you. But I 

 would have come myself only that I have been away 

 from home helping John and Danny these three 

 days," said Roddy McMahon's sister, who some- 

 times came with her three boys to pay me a 

 visit. 



" It's all right," I said, " Miss Ryan has promised 

 to come. Hazel said Mrs. Ryan would have come 



