"Your ideas are out of date, Mother; we've grown ahead of them. Mr. Allinson doesn't look as if he minded. Anyway, he doesn't know as much as I do about the Canadian contractor." He turned to Andrew. "Do you like it up yonder?" "Yes," Andrew answered good-humoredly; "I like the work better than anything I remember having done." "A matter of taste. Now, I can't see much amusement in rolling rocks about or standing in wet slickers in a dark pit watching the boys punch the drills." "Mr. Allinson is not doing it for amusement," said his mother. "Well, money isn't often made that way. You don't get rich by knowing how to use the hammer and giant-powder." "I believe that's true," Andrew responded with a smile. "A sure thing! Money is made by sitting tight in your office and hiring other fellows to do the rough work. They break up the rocks and cut the milling logs; you take the profit. It's business, first and last, for mine!" "Then it's fortunate there are people with different views," his sister interposed. "If nobody were willing to live in the logging camps all winter and go prospecting in the bush, you would be badly off." "But so long as there are people who like doing that kind of thing, we're glad to let them." "This is a favorite pose of his," the girl explained to Andrew. "It's the latest fashion among the boys; they're afraid of being thought altruistic." "Now that everything is controlled by mergers and they make all we need so dear, one is forced to be practical," Mrs. Graham remarked feelingly. "For all that, it jars on me to hear our young people talk as they do." "We're realists, with no use for sentiment," Jim replied. "We don't let our imagination run away with us. It doesn't pay." "You may be wrong in that," said Andrew, smiling, "I'm not much of a philosopher, but it seems to me that imagination's now and then a useful thing. I've seen it help a man through tight places. Take your prospectors, for example; they often face risks that couldn't be justified by a return in money. I heard of one fellow crossing a lake in a savage storm in a leaky canoe, to keep the time he'd allowed for his journey, because he wouldn't be beaten; and of another making two hundred miles on snowshoes with very little food, because a party he'd promised to meet was expecting him." "That," said the lad, "is the kind of thing father would do; he's given to impractical idealism. There's a mine up in the barrens he has talked about as long as I remember; but if he found it I believe he'd be content with that and sell the claim to any one for a few hundred dollars. Getting yourself frozen for an abstract idea isn't good business."