Over Prairie Trails | Page 9

good drink, a good feed of oats and wild hay,

and the birds will waken you in the morning."
The northern lights leaped into the sky just as I turned from this
east-west grade, north again, across a high bridge, to the last road that
led home. To the right I saw a friendly light, and a dog's barking voice
rang over from the still, distant farmstead. I knew the place. An
American settler with a French sounding name had squatted down there
a few years ago.
The road I followed was, properly speaking, not a road at all, though
used for one. A deep master ditch had been cut from ten or twelve
miles north of here; it angled, for engineering reasons, so that I was
going northwest again. The ground removed from the ditch had been
dumped along its east side, and though it formed only a narrow, high,
and steep dam, rough with stones and overgrown with weeds, it was
used by whoever had to go north or south here. The next east-west
grade which I was aiming to reach, four miles north, was the second
correction line that I had to use, twenty-four miles distant from the first;
and only a few hundred yards from its corner I should be at home!
At home! All my thoughts were bent on getting home now. Five or six
hours of driving will make the strongest back tired, I am told. Mine is
not of the strongest. This road lifted me above the things that I liked to
watch. Invariably, on all these drives, I was to lose interest here unless
the stars were particularly bright and brilliant. This night I watched the
lights, it is true: how they streamed across the sky, like driving rain that
is blown into wavy streaks by impetuous wind. And they leaped and
receded, and leaped and receded again. But while I watched, I stretched
my limbs and was bent on speed. There were a few particularly bad
spots in the road, where I could not do anything but walk the horse. So,
where the going was fair, I urged him to redoubled effort. I remember
how I reflected that the horse as yet did not know we were so near
home, this being his first trip out; and I also remember, that my wife
afterwards told me that she had heard me a long while before I
came--had heard me talking to the horse, urging him on and
encouraging him.
Now I came to a slight bend in the road. Only half a mile! And sure
enough: there was the signal put out for me. A lamp in one of the
windows of the school--placed so that after I turned in on the yard, I
could not see it--it might have blinded my eye, and the going is rough

there with stumps and stones. I could not see the cottage, it stood
behind the school. But the school I saw clearly outlined against the
dark blue, star-spangled sky, for it stands on a high gravel ridge. And in
the most friendly and welcoming way it looked with its single eye
across at the nocturnal guest.
I could not see the cottage, but I knew that my little girl lay sleeping in
her cosy bed, and that a young woman was sitting there in the dark, her
face glued to the windowpane, to be ready with a lantern which burned
in the kitchen whenever I might pull up between school and house. And
there, no doubt, she had been sitting for a long while already; and there
she was destined to sit during the winter that came, on Friday
nights--full often for many and many an hour--full often till
midnight--and sometimes longer...

TWO Fog
Peter took me north, alone, on six successive trips. We had rain, we had
snow, we had mud, and hard-frozen ground. It took us four, it took us
six, it took us on one occasion--after a heavy October snowfall--nearly
eleven hours to make the trip. That last adventure decided me. It was
unavoidable that I should buy a second horse. The roads were getting
too heavy for single driving over such a distance. This time I wanted a
horse that I could sell in the spring to a farmer for any kind of work on
the land. I looked around for a while. Then I found Dan. He was a
sorrel, with some Clyde blood in him. He looked a veritable skate of a
horse. You could lay your fingers between his ribs, and he played out
on the first trip I ever made with this newly-assembled, strange-looking
team. But when I look back at that winter, I cannot but say that again I
chose well. After I had fed