Sixteen appealed to Jack. We could have taken the west half, and so, working together, we would have had a mile furrow. The gully also touched sixteen, and would have given us the same advantages as Jake claimed for the sections he had recommended. However, we found him very fixed in his preference for Fourteen and Twenty-two, and finally we accepted his arguments, and set out to make a more detailed survey of the land. The gully angled between the two quarters, taking scarce an acre off either of them. A jolly stream, brown with the grass of its banks, gurgled along its bed. I knelt down to try the water; there was the taste of snow, but there was also the harder, sharper note of spring water mingled with it. "Runnin' water like that is worth a thousand dollars on any man's farm," Jake declared. "An' come up this way. Wait till I show you somethin'." The "something" proved to be a widening in the valley, where was a considerable growth of small willows and poplars. "Fence posts and fire wood," said Jake, "an' on railroad land too, that won't be sold fer years. You'll have 'em all cut down before then. That timber's worth another thousand, or half that, anyway." I thought of the great pine back on the old farm in Ontario, and the "timber" looked to me like gads and switches. None of it was tall enough to reach out of the little valley and show a green tip to the bald surface of the prairies. But we were not in Ontario now; we were in a land where even a three-inch tree was not to be despised. "An' here's somethin' more," he said, setting an example for us by walking stealthily on his pudgy legs through the clumps of willows. At the other end of the wooded space we found a little pond opening out, and a score of wild ducks drowsing placidly on its smooth surface. The bright colorings of the drakes, the beautiful archings of their necks, and their graceful movements on the water held us for a moment in silent admiration. "An Englishman," Jake remarked, when we had turned back, "would take this farm fer the duck pond alone. They're the dangdest people ever was fer wantin' to kill somethin'. He don' care if his farm is all sand or wallows, 's long as there's somethin' to shoot, the Englishman don't. But fer a Yankee it mus' be every acre wheat land. He don' care fer nothin' but the long green." Jake paused as though to think over these national characteristics. "I dunno which is the worst," he said at length. "I reckon us Canadjuns is about right, with a little o' both." "It has been said that a Canadian is half Englishman and half Yankee," I remarked. "What do you make of it?" "Nothin' to it," was Jake's emphatic answer. "When a Canadjun is enjoyin' an argyment with a Yankee he's all English, an' when he's pullin' off a deal with an Englishman he's all Yankee, an'----" "He gets the sixty pounds," said Jack.