Oldest of frocks
(which are more or less stained with either mud or the red paint
with which we have been painting the roofs of both the stable and
the labourers' house), very big aprons, sleeves to match, and our
sun-bonnets. E - - has concocted for herself a thin blue-and-white
shirt, and as she generally lives with her sleeves tucked up, her
arms are getting quite brown and sunburnt. Our boots are the only
things we do not much like cleaning, they get so soon dirty again;
and we have come to the happy conclusion that unblacked boots have
a "cachet" that blacked boots have not. When we first arrived the
men promised to do them for us every Sunday; which promises, like
so many, have partaken of the nature of pie-crusts.
We are both of us delighted to have come, the whole experience is
so new, and what we couldn't have realised in England; and I am
sure, in spite of the _bouleversement_ of the bachelor _regime_, it
is a great pleasure to the men we are here. Our Winnipeg acquaintances
tell us that A - - is quite a changed man, so cheery and even
bumptious, and that everything is now "What we do at the farm."
It is all very well, however, in the summer; if obliged to stay
through the winter, it would be quite another "pair of shoes." The
thermometer often registers forty degrees of frost, though the
effects of this extreme temperature in the dry exhilarating
atmosphere is not so unpleasant as might be imagined, but the
loneliness and dreariness of the prairie with two or three feet of
snow would be appalling. The cold is so great that you have to put
on a buffalo coat, cap, and gloves, before you can touch the stove
to light the fire, and notwithstanding the coal stove which is
always kept going in the hall to warm the up-stairs room (through
which the pipe is carried), the water in buckets standing
alongside gets frozen.
Then the blizzards, which are storms of sleet and snow driven with
a fierce wind, and so thick that it is quite impossible to get out
of doors, or see at all, would be too trying.
Even to get across the yard to the further stable the men have to
have a rope stretched as guide so as not to lose their way; and
these storms sometimes, as they did this last year, continue for
three weeks consecutively.
The snow on the prairie is never very deep, but it drifts a good
deal, and was to the depth of twelve feet on the west side of the
house.
No work can be done much in the winter on account of the cold and
snow, so that from the middle of April, when the snow begins to
go, until the beginning of October everything has to be rushed
through and as many hands put on as they can possibly get, who are
all discharged at the end of the summer and only two or three kept
to look after the animals.
