It was very interesting to go round the farm and see all the wonderful labour-saving devices. They had cut the hay and were getting it in. The term "wild and woolly West" is said to have originated from the "prairie wool," or natural hay, which is specially luxuriant on dried-up sloughs. It is a grass with a fluffy, golden-brown plume. But this natural hay can only be cut every other year, hence many farmers are sowing hay seeds as well. The wagon which they use for carting hay and wheat has enormously high rack-like sides. On this farm, when carting hay, an immense canvas sheet with rings at the corners is put in the wagon and the hay piled up on it. When a wagon-load reaches the barn, a rope attached to a pulley in the barn roof is put through the four rings of the sheet, the horses are taken out of the shafts and harnessed to the pulley-rope, and the whole load is swung up into the barn, along a rod, and on to the rick. The whole operation only takes three minutes. There was a blacksmith's shop on this farm, and as some of the metal on my shock-absorber had broken, our host cut me a piece of metal, and I mended it with his assistance--a job which entailed lying under the car for an hour with earth falling into one's eyes. The vicar was famous as a "fixer" of broken-down Fords, and one day he came to the farm with his children to gather Saskatoon berries.[7] Whilst he was waiting for the party to start, he and our host took out my steering-rod and straightened it at the forge. As he put it back he eyed me solemnly and remarked: "I suppose you know that your two lives depend on this rod."