_The Old House and the New—On_ _a Ruthenian Farm_ [Illustration] _A Family from Poland_ There’s a man driving a dozen cows out to pasture. He has evidently learnt the livestock lesson. Let us pay him a visit. “Yes,” he says, “I learned that much years ago, and it was all right as far as it went. I didn’t keep all my eggs in one basket, and if wheat was poor Mrs. Cow would always keep our heads above water. But that was nothing to what she could do, as I soon found out when I studied the matter, and learned to select and test the cows, and weed out those that didn’t pay for their board. Breeding up, and feeding right, I call this herd my little gold mine.” Quality, again! Quality all the time. “And I don’t spend the gold on gas,” he adds, as an automobile speeds by. “Think of it! Over 63,000 passenger autos in this Province alone—one to every three or four grown-up people—40,000 in Alberta, nearly as many in Manitoba, and 32,000 in British Columbia. Every man must judge for himself, but living as I do, only three miles from town, I couldn’t give ‘business’ as an excuse for keeping a car. What with the cost in money, and the time a man is tempted to spend running around when he’s wanted at home, some of us have been kept pretty tight pinched by our cars.” “You wouldn’t call the West extravagant, on the whole, would you?” He laughs. “No and Yes. You know as well as I do, we farmers didn’t spend over much on ourselves at the best of times. You wouldn’t call a telephone an extravagance, would you, or a gramophone?” “Not for the world! I should be sorry to see the poorest farmer give them up. It’s things like that, and now the radio, with good roads, and the auto when you live a long way out, that have ended the ‘isolation’ we used to complain of. They bring us the advantages of city life without its disadvantages.” “That’s right. And so far as we farmers have spent too much, it has generally not been for pleasure, but for business. We have taken too much land, and bitten off more than we can chew—that was the way of the country, and we had to learn better. We’ve often bought more and bigger machinery than we could profitably use—that was partly because everyone was begging us to raise more grain during the war, partly because we were too easily persuaded by professional salesmen. We haven’t had a business training, worse luck.”