timber and hard to win for the plough. As for me, I picked up my ax
and I said to her:--'Laura, I am going to clear land for you.' And
from morning till night it was chop, chop, chop, without ever coming
back to the house except for dinner; and all that time she did the
work of the house and the cooking, she looked after the cattle,
mended the fences, cleaned the cow-shed, never rested from her
toiling; and then half-a-dozen times a day she would come outside
the door and stand for a minute looking at me, over there by the
fringe of the woods, where I was putting my back into felling the
birches and the spruce to make a patch of soil for her.

"Then in the month of July our well must needs dry up; the cows had
not a drop of water to slake their thirst and they almost stopped
giving milk. So when I was hard at it in the woods the mother went
off to the river with a pail in either hand, and climbed the steep
bluff eight or ten times together with these brimming, and her feet
that slipped back in the running sand, till she had filled a barrel;
and when the barrel was full she got it on a wheelbarrow, and
wheeled it off herself to empty it into the big tub in the
cow-pasture more than three hundred yards from the house, just below
the rocks. It was not a woman's work, and I told her often enough to
leave it to me, but she always spoke up briskly:--'Don't you think
about that--don't think about anything--clear a farm for me.' And
she would laugh to cheer me up, but I saw well enough this was too
much for her, and that she was all dark under the eyes with the
labour of it.

"Well, I caught up my ax and was off to the woods; and I laid into
the birches so lustily that chips flew as thick as your wrist, all
the time saying to myself that the wife I had was like no other, and