after the fight. Not so refined and suggestive and luxurious as when it
was clothed with the coat of ripe corn in the ear, it still showed the
fibre of its being to no disadvantage. And overhead the joy of the
prairie grew apace.

September saw the vast prairie spaces around Askatoon shorn and
shrivelled of its glory of ripened grain, but with a new life come into
the air-sweet, stinging, vibrant life, which had the suggestion of nature
recreating her vitality, inflaming herself with Edenic strength, a
battery charging itself, to charge the world in turn with force and
energy. Morning gave pure elation, as though all created being must
strive; noon was the pulse of existence at the top of its activity;
evening was glamorous; and all the lower sky was spread with those
colours which Titian stole from the joyous horizon that filled his eyes.
There was in that evening light, somehow, just a touch of pensiveness--
the triste delicacy of heliotrope, harbinger of the Indian summer soon to
come, when the air would make all sensitive souls turn to the past and
forget that to-morrow was all in all.

Sensitive souls, however, are not so many as to crowd each other
unduly in this world, and they were not more numerous in Askatoon than
elsewhere. Not everybody was taking joy of sunrises and losing himself
in the delicate contentment of the sunset. There were many who took it
all without thought, who absorbed it unconsciously, and got something
from it; though there were many others who got nothing out of it at all,
save the health and comfort brought by a precious climate whose
solicitous friend is the sun. These heeded it little, even though a
good number of them came from the damp islands lying between the north
Atlantic and the German Ocean. From Erin and England and the land o'
cakes they came, had a few days of staring bright-eyed happy incredulity