But we soon got on to other matters. The girls had dug the potatoes and the garden vegetables, and it was with the honest pride of work well done that they took us into the cellar to view our winter supplies. There is a very real satisfaction in growing one's own food; it gives one a sense of independence, a feeling that the butcher and baker and grocer have no mortgage on one's bodily needs. I think it was that feeling, threaded through with a very homey kind of content, that welled within us as we viewed the heaps of potatoes and turnips and cabbage and carrots and beets and parsnips that filled our cellar to the roof. Jack and I, not to be outdone, felt that now was the moment to show, in concrete form, something of what our harvest labors had meant. We had seized an opportunity while the threshing outfit was shut down on account of rain to drive to the nearest town and lay in a stock of provisions, which Alec Thomson had decently enough allowed us to buy on his account as he, being a contractor, got a better price than the individual consumer. So now we had to carry in the boxes of dried fruits and of canned goods, the sack of sugar, the three sacks of flour, the packages of tea and coffee, the sides of bacon:--Oh, we were going to live well this winter! Then there were the new boots which we had bought all round, and stockings, and an end of cloth which we were sure would come in handy for some useful purpose, and yarn for knitting. We were a happy party. The girls had a strange treat in reserve for us. It was Jean who told us of it, although, as it seemed to me, her manner suggested a certain lack of frankness very unlike Jean. It seemed that a few days before our return a jack rabbit had loped up within easy distance of the shanty door, where he perked himself on his hind legs, taking observations. Marjorie took the gun down from the wall, aimed it with great deliberation, and fired. Jean declared that the rabbit was not hit, but that he died of fright. Be that as it may, he furnished the filling for a very deep and tempting rabbit pie. "And only to think," said Jean, her bright eyes dancing, "it would scarcely have kept any longer. We were managing to freeze it a little at nights, but it would thaw out during the day." "I don't know but it is a little over-kept as it is," Marjorie admitted, "but we're going to eat it to-night." And so we sat about our little table, with the great rabbit pie in the middle, and great helpings of potatoes and onions on our plates, and flakey white bread and yellow home-made butter within reach, and the light beating down from an oil lamp on the wall, and would not have changed places with any one on earth.