"ONE OF MANITOBA'S PROSPEROUS FARMERS"
Mr. Samuel Motherwell was a wealthy farmer who lived a few miles from Millford. Photographs of Mr. Motherwell's premises may be seen in the agricultural journals, machinery catalogues, advertisements for woven wire, etc.—"the home of one of Manitoba's prosperous farmers."
The farm buildings were in good repair; a large red barn with white trimmings surmounted by a creaking windmill; a long, low machine shed filled with binders, seeders, disc-harrows—everything that is needed for the seed-time and harvest and all that lies between; a large stone house, square and gray, lonely and bare, without a tree or a shrub around it. Mr. Motherwell did not like vines or trees around a house. They were apt to attract lightning and bring vermin.
Potatoes grew from the road to the house; and around the front door, as high as the veranda, weeds flourished in abundance, undisturbed and unnoticed.
Behind the cookhouse a bed of poppies flamed scarlet against the general sombreness, and gave a strange touch of colour to the common grayness. They seemed out of place in the busy farmyard. Everything else was there for use. Everybody hurried but the poppies; idlers of precious time, suggestive of slothful sleep, they held up their brazen faces in careless indifference.
Sam had not planted them—you may be sure of that. Mrs. Motherwell would tell you of an English girl she had had to work for her that summer who had brought the seed with her from England, and of how one day when she sent the girl to weed the onions, she had found her blubbering and crying over what looked to Mrs. Motherwell nothing more than weeds. The girl then told her she had brought the seed with her and planted it there. She was the craziest thing, this Polly Bragg. She went every night to see them because they were like a "bit of home," she said. Mrs. Motherwell would tell you just what a ridiculous creature she was!
"I never see the beat o' that girl," Mrs. Motherwell would say. "Them eyes of hers were always red with homesickness, and there was no reason for it in the world, her gettin' more wages than she ever got before, and more'n she was earnin', as I often told her. Land! the way that girl would sing when she had got a letter from home, the queerest songs ye ever heard:
Down by the biller there grew a green willer,
Weeping all night with the bank for a piller.
Well, I had to stop her at last," Mrs. Motherwell would tell you with an apologetic swallow, which showed that even generous people have to be firm sometimes in the discharge of unpleasant duties.
"And, mind you," Mrs. Motherwell would go on, with a grieved air, "just as the busy time came on didn't she up and take the fever—you never can depend on them English girls—and when the doctor was outside there in the buggy waitin' for her—he took her to the hospital—I declare if we didn't find her blubberin' over them poppies, and not a flower on them no mor'n nothing."