278 WHEAT AND WOMAN 



also forty bushels over, which I sold the following 

 September in South Qu'Appelle at a dollar a bushel 

 net. My seed-oats I bought from Mr. John A. 

 Macdonald, for some years the member for North 

 Qu'Appelle and eldest son of the last of the chief 

 factors of the Hudson Bay Company, who is a keen 

 agriculturist and who at that time owned a quarter 

 section at the foot of the hills which skirt South 

 Qu'Appelle on its southern side. This land is now 

 divided up into building sites, but at that time oats 

 were raised from corner to corner of the one hundred 

 and sixty acres. The big field was quite a centre 

 of local interest, and Mr. Macdonald used to sell 

 every grain of its produce as seed, usually at double 

 the average price of oats. 



This seed I sowed in the ten- and four-acred arms 

 of the big field, which had been full ploughed after 

 bearing its two crops of wheat. Barley was sowed 

 in twelve acres of the forty-acre field. Roddy 

 McMahon disced and harrowed it directly we got 

 on the land, in order to give the surface seed a bed 

 to rise through ; and when he had finished wheat 

 and oat-seeding he ploughed in all this voluntary 

 growth and sowed barley. Barley matures so 

 quickly that it should be harvest-ripe before any 

 voluntary accompaniment of wheat or wild or tare 

 oats can arrive at generating point, so that it all 

 comes down together without danger of wasting 

 good in spreading evil seed. 



In the eighteen acres of summer-fallow, the 

 twenty-five acres of breaking Si Booth had broken, 

 and the thirty acres Roddy McMahon had broken, 

 we sowed wheat ; but the last five acres to be sown 

 in the wheat-seeding was the seed-garden on the 



