considered his child to mould as he liked. Billy’s experience had not given him much of the quality called business sense, so he didn’t ask much—a percentage of whatever profits he could show from the place above an estimate for previous years, and a chance to run a few sidelines of his own. Since this would not interfere with his own interests and would mean still having free labor on the farm, Dan was willing to grant it.
And Billy was happy. He couldn’t have told why. Practically, he was just where he had been before; only he had something to hope for. In the house the ham sizzling in the pan, the smell of turnips cooking for dinner and a spicy apple pie bubbling on the back of the stove, filled him with a very tangible comfort. The world had never seemed so near to heaven.
The agricultural course was full of promise. For some time Billy had been painfully reminded of his scant education. The few brief seasons in the local school, following the cramped and theoretical course of prescribed text-books, and his ill chosen reading afterwards, had not given him much that a young man would need. A class of twenty young farmers leaving their work to meet every day in a room above the local store was different; it had some purpose. The informal lectures and discussions were practical from the beginning. The taking of notes, the preparation
of a speech, was new and hard for every one of them, but they were all at the same disadvantage, which carried some encouragement.
On the second day of the course they went to a farm for a class in stock-judging. Boys who would have wormed through a barbed-wire entanglement to get within touching distance of the prize animals at the provincial fair, but who might as well have hoped to enter a sacred temple as a show ring, could examine to their hearts’ content the most aristocratic specimens of Aberdeen-Angus lineage in the country. Added to their instruction in rules and principles they had the unstinted and practical advice of the man himself who had built up the herd, whose name was known to stockmen in every province of the Dominion.
When they had finished he took them to the house. There was a great, long living-room with red curtains and a log blazing in a brick fireplace, and his wife, in a big blue apron, her cheeks red from the warmth of the kitchen stove, gave them hot biscuits and coffee. The man’s voice boomed heartily through the house, and the baby from a quilt on the floor reached up to him. It was amazing the dexterity with which he could tuck the babe away, perfectly contented, in the hollow of his arm, and use both hands in expounding the points of various Panmures and Black Megs, with the history of their ancestors
from the oldest farms in Scotland. He made no effort to keep his business affairs out of his home, this man; the two were so intimately connected that their interests were common. Either would have failed long ago without the support of the other. His wife knew exactly what he was talking about. Her pride in the herd was about as great as his own; she had made little sacrifices and taken with him the risks involved in buying new, expensive stock. It was a fine kind of co-operation.
The warmth and peace and genuineness of it all filled Billy with a happy wonder. He forgot to be embarrassed, but he sat in a corner as much out of sight as possible, watching the restful air of content about the woman, and listening to the man’s enthusiastic forecast of the future of the breed in Canada. The stockman noticed his interest, and when they were ready to go he kept the rest waiting while he took him back to go more fully into the peculiar traits of a certain family. Then he asked:
“What do you keep at home?”
“Most anything,” Billy answered, with a grim little smile.