My son was right; farming, as I saw it in my wanderings, was not attractive. In Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Ontario, the surroundings were delightful, but profits seemed small; while the prairie, from the Canadian Pacific Railway down to Iowa, though certainly productive, was to my eyes as heart-breaking as the plains of India. Travelling south from Buffalo, after a visit to the Guelph Agricultural College, which later received my son, a farmer joined me. He was Yankee to look at, but his tongue was Devonshire. It attracted a rough-looking customer in our carriage; he was Cumberland, and we three exchanged ideas. Cumberland was a wanderer who had worked all over the States up to the Pacific; Devonshire was naturalised, and thereon Cumberland took him to task. Devonshire, he said, had sold his birthright for a mess of pottage. Devonshire submitted that he could live on the pottage, while Cumberland did not seem to thrive on the birthright. Both had been agricultural labourers at home, and now Devonshire had a little holding nestling in one of the lovely vales which we were traversing. He could live thereon, certainly, but what a life! Cumberland, I think, had a better time, while able for the varied work which he could always find. Better for either would have been our army, navy, or police. That class does not know the soldier’s advantages when he has risen to sergeant and stays in the army. Sore though my son’s struggle was he was right not to farm. Certainly he lost his capital, but this is the normal English lot in the States; at his mine in Texas a man came for a watchman’s job who had started with £4000! Such, it seems, is the “footing” which the gentle, handicapped by their traditions, must necessarily pay. Nevertheless, those traditions are an asset, as this book shows; so are horsemanship; the athletics and the “straight left” which public schools taught in those days if they taught little else; also a straight eye and steady nerve behind a pistol. My son’s experience may not tempt others of his class to seek fortune in America, but if they do so they will learn therefrom what to expect, in what spirit to meet it, and what equipment they need. L. J. H. GREY. _March 1912._ CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAGE "Thousand Pounders"—Ontario Agricultural College—Political 1 Meetings—Volunteer Artillery—Value of the Agricultural College CHAPTER II Calgary—A Cow-puncher—"Roping"—Life on a Ranch—A Calgary 11 Hail-storm—“Gun-plays” and "Bad-men"—Sarci Indians CHAPTER III Road-agents—“Roping” Contests—Broncho-busting—Strathclair—A 24 Blizzard—Lumber Camps CHAPTER IV