"I am used to it, and can do all the cooking that is necessary," he said.

"It is the usual home for the beginner, and I lived six months in one--on grindstone bread, the tinctured glucose you are probably not acquainted with as 'drips,' and rancid pork--when I first came out to this country and hired myself, for ten dollars monthly, to another man.

It is a diet one gets a little tired of occasionally, but after breaking prairie twelve hours every day one can eat almost anything, and when I afterwards turned farmer my credit was rarely good enough to provide the pork." The girl looked at him curiously, for she knew how some of the smaller settlers lived, and once more felt divided between wonder and sympathy.
She could picture the grim self-denial, for she had seen the stubborn patience in this man's face, as well as a stamp that was not born by any other man at Silverdale.

Some of the crofter settlers, who periodically came near starvation in their sod hovels, and the men from Ontario who staked their little handful of dollars on the first wheat crop to be wrested from the prairie, bore it, however.

From what Miss Barrington had told her, it was clear that Courthorne's first year in Canada could not have been spent in this fashion, but there was no doubt in the girl's mind as she listened.