250 WHEAT AND WOMAN 



even delightful, and often have I looked back 

 regretfully on those mornings of exhilarating work 

 and healing solitude when a breakfast of sugarless, 

 milkless, but newly made coffee, and bread thawed in 

 the oven, seemed truly a feast for the gods. 



Just before Christmas I drove into the Fort to get 

 a fresh supply of necessaries, and the delicacy I 

 resolved on was a pound of butter. It cost forty 

 cents, and when I got home I was so cold that I 

 forgot it was in the sleigh and only remembered it 

 in the morning when I saw a piece of grocery paper 

 by the door. Roddy McMahon's dog Rover and 

 several of his friends had followed us home and 

 evidently devoured the spoil. Butter is a great 

 luxury at Christmas-time, while eggs cannot be had 

 either for love or money, but my friend Mrs. 

 McDougall received a pound of butter, I think as 

 a Christmas gift, and shared it with me. 



On Christmas Day I drove in to service at the 

 Anglican Church. A biting wind blew a fierce 

 pain between my eyes, so, declining various invita- 

 tions, I spent the greater part of the feast day in 

 my stack-yard and, I am afraid, made Christmas 

 night anything but a time of peace and good tidings 

 for my neighbour who came to seek his marauding 

 cattle. But I had been tried in the fire and found 

 wanting all through the day, and as a climax, in 

 chasing the beasts out of the yard, I lost one of the 

 pretty earrings that had been among the Christmas 

 gifts sent to me from England. When you have 

 never a moment to examine your own reflection 

 except when the mirror is frozen over, when if 

 you do catch an unexpected glimpse of yourself 

 you wish you hadn't, earrings are a refuge of the 



