"A tent," she said, "cannot be a very comfortable place to live in, and
who cooks for you?"
Winston smiled dryly. "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. Her faith was equal to a
more strenuous test.
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