After awhile Marjorie and Jean managed to explain that it was quite the thing in Canada, when visiting a neighbour, to carry your eatables with you, and produced a well packed basket out of our wagon. We had to saw up a board which Mr. Brown was using in his building operations in order to make an extension of the table so that all might sit down together. And when we had done that Mrs. Brown surprised us all by covering it with a cloth of the finest Irish linen, and producing from somewhere a setting of hand-painted china, aided and abetted by a tea service of real silver. And after supper Brown showed us his fire-arms. He had a perfect arsenal of them, when he was in much greater need of a cow. And Mrs. Brown, I know, was showing the girls wonderful things out of boxes. And when it was all dark and starry we hitched the oxen to the wagon, and shook hands all round, and kissed the children all round, and the girls kissed Mrs. Brown, and Mr. Brown forgot himself and kissed the girls, and Jack and I almost kissed Mrs. Brown, and we drew slowly away, waving our hands and watching the five figures framed in the doorway against the yellow light of the oil lamp on the opposite wall. And we knew that in some way we had brought the hedges and lanes and rose-gardens of England down to that crude shanty on section Four and had woven them about another little sentry-box on the most skyward trenches of civilization. . . . And the next day Jack and I drove over again and showed Brown how to build a sod stable. Our experience with the Browns encouraged us to cultivate the acquaintance of our other neighbours, and as the short, bright days of November wore by the low-hanging sun often saw our ox-wagon wending slowly across the prairies, and the North Star and the Great Dipper were the silent witnesses of its return to Fourteen. Sometimes, too, the great magician of the North would light his mimic candles, and we would creak homeward in the weird light of their flickering battalions minueting on the stage of the universe. Smith, the Scotsman, and Burke, the American, received us with undivided hospitality and that strange sense of common interest which is the most priceless thing about pioneer life; one of the rich qualities of human nature which seems inevitably to dry up in the more complex civilisations. Ole Hansen entertained us for a full hour in the stable before his buxom Olga consented to admit us into the house. When at last we were granted that privilege there were evidence of hurried scrubbing of floors and faces. "My wife bane all the time yust on the yump," Ole explained apologetically. "Some time Ay tank by damn we have too many kids, eh?" It appeared that Ole was beginning to harbor some modern ideas about the size of families. His opinion that six was "yust a nice commence" was being shaken. The housing problem was coming home to him and bearing its inevitable fruit.