that while he waits, far under the snow the wheat is slowly expanding;
and as in April, the white frost flies out of the soil into the sun, it
will push upward and outward, green and vigorous, greeting his eye with
the "What cheer, partner!" of a mate in the scheme of nature.

Not Arcady; and yet many of the joys of Arcady are here--bright, singing
birds, wide adventurous rivers, innumerable streams, the squirrel in the
wood and the bracken, the wildcat stealing through the undergrowth, the
lizard glittering by the stone, the fish leaping in the stream, the
plaint of the whippoorwill, the call of the bluebird, the golden flash of
the oriole, the honk of the wild geese overhead, the whirr of the mallard
from the sedge. And, more than all, a human voice declaring by its joy
in song that not only God looks upon the world and finds it very good.




CHAPTER I

"PIONEERS, O PIONEERS"

If you had stood on the borders of Askatoon, a prairie town, on the
pathway to the Rockies one late August day not many years ago, you would
have heard a fresh young human voice singing into the morning, as its
possessor looked, from a coat she was brushing, out over the "field of
the cloth of gold," which your eye has already been invited to see. With
the gift of singing for joy at all, you should be able to sing very
joyously at twenty-two. This morning singer was just that age; and if
you had looked at the golden carpet of wheat stretching for scores of
miles, before you looked at her, you would have thought her curiously in