"Well, sir, you'll save a lot of hired help; that's the deuce, payin' out money to hired help, and feedin' them, too. I lost two of my boys when they were just little lads, beginnin' to be some good. Terrible blow on me; they'd a been able to handle a team in a year or two, if they'd a lived--twins they were, too. After raisin' them for six years, it was hard--year of the frozen wheat, too--oh, yes, 'tain't all easy. Now, there's old Bruce Simpson, back there at Pelican Lake. It would just do you good to be there of a mornin.' He has four boys and four girls, and just at the clip of five o'clock them lads jump out of bed--the eight feet hit the floor at the same minute and come leppin' down the stairs four abreast, each fellow with a lantern, and get out to the stable and feed up. The four girls are just the same--fine, smart, turkey-faced girls they are, with an arm like a stove-pipe. You'll be all right with the help you've got--you'll have nearly enough to run a threshin' mill. Any girls?" "Two girls," said John Watson. "Two! That's not so bad--they'll be needed all right to help the missus. I have two girls, too; but one of them's no good--too much like the mother's folks. You know the Grahams are all terrible high-headed people--one of the old man's brothers is a preacher down in the States--Professor Graham, they call him--and sir, they can't get over it. Martha, my oldest girl, she's all right--straight Perkins, Martha is--no nonsense about her; but Edith, she's all for gaddin' round and dressin' up. 'Pa,' she says one day to me, 'I want a piano'--that was the Graham comin' out of her--and I says, says I 'Edie, my dear, run along now and let me hear you play a toon on the cream separator or the milkin'-stool,' says I; 'there's more money in it.' But, by George! the wife kept at me, too, about this piano business, just pesterin' the very life out o' me, until I got sick of it. But I got them one at last--I was at a sale in Brandon, last fall, and I got one for eighty dollars. I told them it cost four hundred--you have to do it, when you're dealin' with wimmin'--they like things to cost a lot. Well, sir, I got the worth of my money, let me tell you. It's a big, long, dappled one, all carved with grapes and lions. Two or three people can play it at once, and it's big enough to make a bed on it when there's company. But what do you think of this now? Oh, it has clean disgusted me. They don't like it because it won't go in the parlour door, and there isn't room for it in the hall, and if you'll believe me, it's sittin' out there in the machine-shed--so I've got to take it down to Winnipeg and try to change it.