It must, I think, be frankly admitted that the isolation of the life in many instances either on a homestead or on a great Western farm is hard for the woman. Some little time since I met a bright young woman, with one small girl of four or five, who was thankfully travelling south to Vancouver from an island in the neighbourhood of Prince Rupert, where for a considerable part of two years she had been living on a pre-emption whilst her husband had been away working on the new railway. She told me that, with the exception of one solitary young man—a neighbouring homesteader—she had had no neighbour nearer than three miles away, and that there had been days during the two years when she had been so ill that she could not leave her bed to give bread to the little one, who, scarcely out of babyhood, had had to be sent herself to the “bread box” to get something to eat. Such a story seems suggestive of possible tragedy, but the woman did not dwell on what might have been, but rejoiced simply in the fact that the hard task was over, and that, largely through her effort, they had the patent for the land, which now they would be able to sell if they could find a purchaser. I could not help thinking that one quality of the woman that Western Canada needs is courage, and another is resourcefulness; and perhaps if I repeat here the story told me by the wife of a successful pioneer farmer in Saskatchewan, it may help, more than any generalities, to give an idea of a woman’s lot on a prairie farm. Mrs. Smith—as I will call her—had gone as a bride to a little house of one lower room (fourteen feet by sixteen) and a half storey upstairs. She, by the way, had spent her girlhood in the West, and perhaps knew from experience how to manage under circumstances which would have sorely tried an Englishwoman of her class. [Illustration: THE SASKATCHEWAN RIVER AT EDMONTON.] The tiny dwelling, lined with building paper and thin boards, was not plastered for a year or two and at first the one room was kitchen, dining-room and washhouse. The house was a full mile from the next one, and stood in the centre of a great field of wheat, which sometimes, when the babies (who soon arrived) began to toddle, seemed to the young mother to grow perilously high, for she had heard stories of little ones wandering off into the tall wheat and being lost.