"Got to get more coal," said Harris. "We'll take two teams, an' it'll be late when we get back."
"Try and not be too late," said the mother, quietly. "You have to be at work so early in the morning, you know."
"I think it's all nonsense, this day-an'-night work," persisted
Beulah. "Is there never going to be any let-up to it?"
"Beulah, you forget yourself," said her father, "If you'd more to do you'd have less lime to fret about it. Your mother did more work in one summer than you have in all your life, an' she's doin' more yet."
"Oh, Beulah's a good help," interposed Mary. "I hope she never has to work like I did."
"I guess the work never hurt us," said Harris, helping himself to preserved strawberries. "Just the same, I'm glad to see you gettin' it a bit easier. But this younger generation—it beats me what we're comin' to. Thinkin' about nothin' but fun and gaddin' to town every night or two. And clo'es—Beulah here's got more clo'es than there were in the whole Plainville settlement the first two or three years."
"I got more neighbours, too," interjected the girl. Then springing up, she stood behind her father's chair and put her arm around his neck.
"Don't be cross, Dad," she whispered. "Your heart's in the right place—but a long way in."
He disengaged her, gently enough. As Beulah said, his heart was all right, but a long way in. Twenty-five years of pitched battle with circumstances—sometimes in victory, sometimes in defeat, but never in despair; always with a load of expense about him, always with the problem of income and outlay to be solved—had made of Harris a man very different from the young idealist of '82. During the first years of struggle for a bare existence in some way the flame of idealism still burned, but with the dawn of the "better times" there came a gradual shifting of standards and a new conception of essentials. At first the settlers attached little value to their land; it was free for the taking, and excited no envy among them. The crops of the early years were unprofitable on account of the great distance to market; later, when the railway came to their doors, the crops were still unprofitable, owing to falling prices and diminishing yields due to poor cultivation. Then came a decade during which those who stayed in the country stayed because they could not get out, and it became a current saying that the more land a man farmed the deeper he got in debt. Homesteads were abandoned; settlers flew by night "across the line" or to more distant districts to begin their fight over again. And yet, in some way, Harris kept his idealism amid all the adversity in which the community was steeped; reverses could neither crush his spirit nor deflect it from its ambitions.
Then came the swing of the pendulum. No one knows just what started it prosperity-wards. Some said it was that the farmers, disheartened with wheat-growing, were applying themselves to stock, and certain it is that in "mixed farming" the community eventually found its salvation; others attributed the change to improved agricultural implements, to improved methods of farming, to greater knowledge of prairie conditions, to reductions in the cost of transportation and enlarged facilities for marketing, or to increasing world demand and higher world prices for the product of the farm. But whatever the causes—and no doubt all of the above contributed—the fact gradually dawned upon the settlers that land—their land—was worth money.