Again I began to talk to the horse. "Only five miles now,
Peter, and then the night's rest. A good drink, a good
feed of oats and wild hay, and the birds will waken you
in the morning."

The northern lights leaped into the sky just as I turned
from this east-west grade, north again, across a high
bridge, to the last road that led home. To the right I
saw a friendly light, and a dog's barking voice rang over
from the still, distant farmstead. I knew the place. An
American settler with a French sounding name had squatted
down there a few years ago.

The road I followed was, properly speaking, not a road
at all, though used for one. A deep master ditch had been
cut from ten or twelve miles north of here; it angled,
for engineering reasons, so that I was going northwest
again. The ground removed from the ditch had been dumped
along its east side, and though it formed only a narrow,
high, and steep dam, rough with stones and overgrown with
weeds, it was used by whoever had to go north or south
here. The next east-west grade which I was aiming to
reach, four miles north, was the second correction line
that I had to use, twenty-four miles distant from the
first; and only a few hundred yards from its corner I
should be at home!

At home! All my thoughts were bent on getting home now.
Five or six hours of driving will make the strongest back
tired, I am told. Mine is not of the strongest. This road