PREPARING SEED-GRAIN 263 



travelling agent was brought home to me. I wrote 

 to Chatham complaining of the changing mood and 

 time of the mill, and received several neatly typed 

 sheets of argument and copies of unsolicited testi- 

 monials in reply, chiefly in testimony of the immense 

 satisfaction the Chatham separator had given to 

 every one else in the North-West. The unsolicited 

 testimonials included one from the Minister of 

 Agriculture in the province of Saskatchewan, and 

 was evidently intended as the final proof of my 

 personal lack of intelligence, or veracity. Of 

 information, or in answer to my suggestion to trade 

 for another mill, neither ink nor paper nor the valu- 

 able moments of working hours of a stenographer 

 were thrown away, and, swallowing another expen- 

 sive lesson from experience, I purchased another 

 model from Messrs. Morgan and Vicars of South 

 Qu'Appelle. This operated as a fanning mill in 

 addition to its special purpose as a wild-oat separator, 

 and although it cost more it was well worth the 

 difference in price. 



From the time of the arrival of the mill I cleaned 

 many bushels of grain in the forbidding tempera- 

 ture of the granary, instead of a few bushels in the 

 comfortable warmth of the kitchen ; but the cleaned 

 seed-grain was soon ahead of my stock of grain bags, 

 which vanish from the prairie far more surely and 

 certainly than illusion itself. So I fell back on an 

 empty bedroom as a seed-grain store, and before 

 the end of March I had eighty bushels ready for 

 seeding, including eight bushels I had cleaned by 

 hand and which I reserved for the five-acre seed 

 garden I had broken on the north-west boundary. 



One Sunday in March the Mazey girls came over 



