Some Jobs Can Be Put Through Before
Winter; Others Must Be Laid Aside Ready To Jump Forward Without A Lost
Minute In Spring.
Thus, from Quebec to Calgary a note of drive - not
hustle, but drive and finish-up - hummed like the steam-threshers on the
still, autumn air.
Hunters and sportsmen were coming in from the North; prospectors with
them, their faces foil of mystery, their pockets full of samples, like
prospectors the world over. They had already been wearing wolf and coon
skin coats. In the great cities which work the year round,
carriage - shops exhibited one or two seductive nickel-plated sledges, as
a hint; for the sleigh is 'the chariot at hand here of Love.' In the
country the farmhouses were stacking up their wood-piles within reach of
the kitchen door, and taking down the fly-screens, (One leaves these
on, as a rule, till the double windows are brought up from the cellar,
and one has to hunt all over the house for missing screws.) Sometimes
one saw a few flashing lengths of new stovepipe in a backyard, and
pitied the owner. There is no humour in the old, bitter-true stovepipe
jests of the comic papers.
But the railways - the wonderful railways - told the winter's tale most
emphatically. The thirty-ton coal cars were moving over three thousand
miles of track. They grunted and lurched against each other in the
switch-yards, or thumped past statelily at midnight on their way to
provident housekeepers of the prairie towns.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 126 of 264
Words from 33919 to 34174
of 71314
