We Certainly Did Try To Clean
Up A Bit, But We Still Help In Housework, And Have To Do As The
Servants At Home.
If we expect visitors, or on a Sunday, put on a
tidy gown; otherwise we generally live in the
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.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 57 of 127
Words from 15121 to 15443
of 34200
