They were busy times for us. Every hour of springtime, like the seed sown in the spring, multiplies many fold by autumn; the tale of slothfulness in spring is written big in harvest--or rather, in lack of harvest. As soon as the snow was gone from the plowed fields and the frost was out an inch or two we were at work with our harrows; then, in a few days more, sowing our crops. There was a pleasant neighbourliness, a satisfying community of interest, in casting the eye across our level prairies and noting the slow-moving seeder-shuttles plying up and down across the cool, moist warp of earth. The skies and clouds of springtime were almost as wonderful as the prairie dawns and sunsets. I suppose it is because of the vast sameness of the prairies themselves that we learned to turn our eyes so often to the heavens. When one's vision is hemmed about by woods and hills he is in danger of missing the greater majesty of the skies. Many a breathing spell had Buck and Bright while I turned in my plow-handles to watch the gentle drift of cloud shadows gliding over the fields, or to plunge my eyes into the blue vacuum of eternal space. When Jean would bring my lunch at four in the afternoon we would sit on the grass in the shade of the wagon at the end of the field and daydream for a moment or two with feathery, fleecy, high-flying clouds of heaven as a background for our fancies. Sometimes great, billowy, boisterous, low-lying masses loomed up in our horizon, level along the bottom like islands floating in a sea of space; heaped and puffed and pinnacled in their upper parts. If these gathered and grew we might expect a dash of rain with a bright sun afterwards and a rainbow in the east. Jean would throw the remaining crumbs to the gophers and massage Buck's forehead between the horns before she left. This was always a popular proceeding for Buck. He acknowledged it by circling his prodigious tongue about his nose, and sometimes embracing Jean's apron in its orbit. It had been arranged that during the busy season I should take my meals at Jack's, and Jean had volunteered the duty of carrying my afternoon lunches to the field. There was little time now for either poetry or prose, and yet we lived amazingly in the spirit. Between the plow-handles one must think of something, and I recalled and re-recalled those things I had read during the winter. At lunch time, or in the evenings, I would talk of them with Jean, always trying to approach her from some new and unsuspected angle. As, for instance, when a summer shower threatened us, I quoted (I had borrowed a Shelley from Spoof): "I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, From the seas and the streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noon-day dreams. From my wings are shaken the dews that waken The sweet buds every one----"