she did, and of things she desperately needed to know. So all the
luxury, power and prestige that had been given to Sylvia Castleman
seemed as nothing beside Mary Abbott, with her modern attitude and
her common-sense.

My girlhood was spent upon a farm in Iowa. My father had eight
children, and he drank. Sometimes he struck me; and so it came about
that at the age of seventeen I ran away with a boy of twenty who
worked upon a neighbour's farm. I wanted a home of my own, and Tom
had some money saved up. We journeyed to Manitoba, and took out a
homestead, where I spent the next twenty years of my life in a
hand-to-hand struggle with Nature which seemed simply incredible to
Sylvia when I told her of it.

The man I married turned out to be a petty tyrant. In the first five
years of our life he succeeded in killing the love I had for him;
but meantime I had borne him three children, and there was nothing
to do but make the best of my bargain. I became to outward view a
beaten drudge; yet it was the truth that never for an hour did I
give up. When I lost what would have been my fourth child, and the
doctor told me that I could never have another, I took this for my
charter of freedom, and made up my mind to my course; I would raise
the children I had, and grow up with them, and move out into life
when they did.

This was when I was working eighteen hours a day, more than half of
it by lamp-light, in the darkness of our Northern winters. When the
accident came, I had been doing the cooking for half a dozen men,
who were getting in the wheat upon which our future depended. I fell
in my tracks, and lost my child; yet I sat still and white while the