THE COMING OF FELICITY 277 



but hours are usually more plentiful than dollars 

 through the first few years of a farmer's proceeding. 

 When the pile of bathed grain is dry, I bag, pouring 

 the grain rather slowly into the bag in order to 

 seize on any wild oat that has escaped annihilation. 

 I had sown dirty seed and reaped its harvest in 

 1906, but I think I can truthfully say no farmer 

 sowed cleaner wheat than I in the years that 

 followed. That year, 1907, my grain was pro- 

 nounced the cleanest that went into the town ; 

 and it chanced that in 1910 seed-cleaning and 

 pickling was the first form of farm labour into which 

 I initiated some Englishwomen who came out to 

 me as pupils. It is always a test of patience, almost 

 of endurance ; but the result again was excellent, 

 my 1910 crop scored No. i Northern and was 

 declared to be the cleanest and best sample of grain 

 threshed in the neighbourhood. I sold a quantity 

 of it for seed, and about seven hundred bushels in 

 the following May at a dollar a bushel. But of 

 course clean seed is only half the battle ; the land 

 also must be clean, and that is a far more difficult 

 matter to deal with. 



To return to 1906. My pickling process can be 

 very cold, and it was not possible to do a great 

 quantity at a time in the granary as the water froze 

 in the barrel and the pickled grains froze together 

 in the heap, and my hands were painfully numb and 

 helpless ; so with a little persuasion I got a barrel 

 into the kitchen, and there I pickled seed-grain in 

 comfort, if I cooked in more or less disorder. 



In all I cleaned nearly two hundred bushels of 

 my 1906 crop, but not nearly so much was used for 

 seed. I had many bags of tailings for the pigs, and 



