"I don’t understand him at all, sir," said Russell, as they walked over the fields, and through the rich grasses of much that was still untouched prairie-land. "He appears to have done very little. There has not been more than about thirty acres under cultivation all the time he was here." "I suppose he must have run out his capital, and left nothing to buy stock with." "I daresay that was about it. He probably sent all he raised the first season to market, or nearly all, and the quantity for the next harvest was so small that he never recovered." "What I think of doing is, to try and get about fifty acres under wheat for next harvest. We ought to be able to manage that." "Yes, with some little additional labour, which I daresay can be hired in town." "What’s the distance into town?" inquired Sinclair. "I think the nearest is Church Bridge, about seven miles; the next is Bredenbury, which is about two miles farther." "I’ll see to it to-morrow," he added. The week that elapsed prior to the event which all were looking forward to was a busy one for Sinclair and his two companions. The house, with its farm-buildings, although sound and in a fairly good condition, had been sadly neglected, and needed a considerable amount of attention to render them clean and presentable and worthy of their new tenant. The waggons and carts wanted repairing,—nuts were missing, bolts were loose, damaged spokes required replacing, and loosened tyres demanded skilled handling. Harness was not much better: where buckles had fled, cord or thong had been substituted; broken straps were found pieced together with string; and, in fact, every contrivance seemed to have been adopted to patch or conceal a flaw rather than spend a penny on a necessary repair. Agricultural implements were in a like shady condition; many being cast aside as valueless which a trifling outlay would easily restore to utility again. The easy, negligent, and happy-go-lucky disposition of the Irishman was so stamped on all around, that, had he not already known it, it would have been a comparatively easy matter to have arrived at the conclusion, from the condition in which things had been left, that the last tenant must have been one of Erin’s sons. At the Ranch, Mrs. Ranger, with the two women, were fully employed, or so they thought they were, and endeavoured to impress everyone else with their own belief that they were. And if the difficulty experienced in getting a plain answer to an ordinary question might be regarded as some proof of the truth of the representation, there was abundant evidence of the fact from that source alone.