Hansen – A Novel of Canadianization

By Augustus Bridle

"Hansen – A Novel of Canadianization" by Augustus Bridle. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Good Press
• Release date: Aug 31, 2021
• ISBN: 4064066369606

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Augustus Bridle

Hansen – A Novel of Canadianization

Published by Good Press, 2022

[e-mail]

EAN 4064066369606

Table of Contents

PREFACE

BOOK ONE SAW-MILL AND SCHOOL

CHAPTER I. Swamp-Elm and Cross-cut Saw.

CHAPTER II. The Jericho Corner Store.

CHAPTER III. A Revival and a Dance.

CHAPTER IV. Splitting Fence Rails.

CHAPTER V. Dominion Day Celebration.

CHAPTER VI. Three-Master at Port Sand.

CHAPTER VII. The Old Chieftain.

CHAPTER VIII. Dr. Strang and the Epidemic.

CHAPTER IX. Citizenship at School.

CHAPTER X. Autograph Album.

CHAPTER XI. Financial Discrepancies.

CHAPTER XII. Tar and Feathers.

BOOK TWO THE COUNTY TOWN

CHAPTER I. Collegiate Dreams.

CHAPTER II. The Lil Niggers.

CHAPTER III. Sequel to Christmas.

CHAPTER IV. Social Distinctions.

CHAPTER V. Americanizing Symptoms.

CHAPTER VI. A Caller From Detroit.

CHAPTER VII. A Case of Nerves.

CHAPTER VIII. A Matter of Clothes.

CHAPTER IX. Psychic Phenomena.

CHAPTER X. The Unprofessional Hypnotist.

INTERLUDE A TABLOID OF TWO YEARS.

BOOK THREE CITIES AND SENTIMENT

CHAPTER I. A New Jerusalem.

CHAPTER II. Dii Immortales.

CHAPTER III. Seams and Schubert.

CHAPTER IV. Cowslips.

CHAPTER V. Back from Algoma.

CHAPTER VI. A Touch of Montreal.

CHAPTER VII. Dialogues in French.

CHAPTER VIII. Two Women.

CHAPTER IX. Maritime Visions.

CHAPTER X. The New Song of 1896.

Chapter XI. A Long Shot.

CHAPTER XII. Convocation.

CHAPTER XIII. A Triangle.

CHAPTER XIV. Te Deum.

CHAPTER XV. East and West.

BOOK FOUR ON THE TRAIL

CHAPTER I. The Klondiker.

CHAPTER II. Organizing the Vote.

CHAPTER III. A Fashionable Wedding.

CHAPTER IV. Music Hath Charms.

CHAPTER V. A Cree Folk-Song.

CHAPTER VI. Love and Ethics.

CHAPTER VII. Half-Breed Prodigals.

CHAPTER VIII. Railway and Burros.

CHAPTER IX. A Long Memory.

CHAPTER X. The Square Deal.

CHAPTER XI. Trains and Trails.

CHAPTER XII. Progress and Ambition.

CHAPTER XIII. The Prisoner.

CHAPTER XIV. Big-Swift-Running.

CHAPTER XV. Love on Horseback.

CHAPTER XVI. Two Weddings.

PREFACE

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Patriotism, said Dr. Johnson, is the last refuge of a scoundrel. He was, perhaps, thinking of politicians. To the immigrant Canadian hereinafter known as Hansen, patriotism presented itself as the first privilege of a citizen in a strange land. As a youth in an Ontario saw-mill village he had venerated John A. Macdonald. As a man he paid homage to Laurier. As a citizen trailsman he learned that true love of a country so vast, variegated and visionary as Canada must be greater than politicians, parties, sects, provinces or even racial idioms.

Which of course was a cheerful delusion possible only to one who indulged also the belief that a man must love his adopted country better than his native land, and that a voluntary citizen of Canada can love it as deeply as a man born in Canada. The fact of eight million people trying to make a nation with 3,729,000 square miles of territory seemed to him to need more than an Act of Confederation, three transcontinental railways and elections. He recognized it as one of the great epics of the world, possible only to races such as the Anglo-Saxons, British and French who together projected the geographical paradox known as the British Empire. As these sea races had the Viking’s love of travel, so patriotic Canadians, whether native or immigrant, must have a love of adventure deeper than making plausible orations without faith, and tremendous fortunes without hard work—and as great as the energies which created old Quebec and old Ontario, the Hudson’s Bay Co. and the transcontinental railways.

The story has the form and method of a novel, and the character of a large sketch which it has been found convenient to divide into four Books. It contains many characters, all but two or three of whom are taken from life, and some of whom reappear at various intervals over a canvas purposely made large, because Canada itself with nine millions of people and ten parliaments is itself a vast sketch in the picture gallery of nations.

A. B.

---

Note—The real preface to HANSEN is to be found near the back of the book: a speech to a strange crowd on the prairie in which Hansen, who had formerly seen men as trees walking, saw Canada as a picture gallery of romantic peoples in a country infinitely more complex than the Ontario saw-mill settlements of the ’80’s. Jericho was a village on Canada Company land which because of difficult drainage remained a forest primeval for years after higher Ontario had been cleared up. Plainsville is an incomplete aspect of a real market town in that country; Kirkville a mere suggestion of a different type of Ontario town, which in an earlier draft of the book was given four chapters. The incidents regarding the University of Toronto are casual extra-mural glimpses of the celebrated class of ’95, which contained the present Premier of Canada, the late Secretary of State for Ireland, four writers of fiction, one poet—and Henry Hooper.

BOOK ONE

SAW-MILL AND SCHOOL

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CHAPTER I.

Swamp-Elm and Cross-cut Saw.

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On a snow-driving night in the year 1887, a tall youth with a mop of spiky flaxen hair stood by a window in a log-walled bedroom with clay in the chinks. By the flare of an oil lamp he could see through the frost ferns, that for days had not melted, the fresh snow framing the pictures on the panes; the crystals gleaming and kaleidoscoping into filmy fabrics of indescribable delicacy; and to his attentive ear the swift swip of the driven snow on the window was like the music of a bird’s wing.

Presently he turned to the handmade bed with its patchwork quilts and straw tick, coggled the lamp carefully on a chair and began to read again that marvellous description of snow crystals in Tyndall’s Forms of Water. For a whole hour he read, jealous of each page that took him nearer the fascinating end; then one of the voices which since nine o’clock had been bumbling below, called from the farmer’s bedroom, Olaf! Put out that lamp an’ go to bed.

Yah, he called. I will go now. Piously he stowed the precious book of Tyndall’s New York Lectures on top of three other books under his bed. On the rag mat he drew off his brown duck smock and trousers, blew out the lamp and rolled into bed in his underwear. I know I am told to come to bed in the dark, he mumbled. But I will pay for the coal-oil. To-morrow—sawlogging, he says. Yah.

Stars, themselves a million crystals, spangled the roof of the world when that same peremptory voice banged up the staircase, Olaf! Gid-up!

Yah. I will get up right away.

Almost feeling the vapour of his breath he creaked downstairs past the rooms of seven children, yanked on his cow-hide boots in the kitchen where a fire was roaring in the big stove, and followed Hiram Flater with his bobbing lantern through a foot of snow to the early chores at the low barn with the cow-shed behind. Breakfast before daybreak; all the Flaters, including the baby, were pulling on boots and swuzzling faces in the whitewashed, logsided kitchen. Cornelia Flater, stout and cheery in a big apron, stood between the enormous top oven and a brown-oilclothed table decorated with nine mush-bowls. Hiram, whiskered, rawboned, grim, took the Bible from its shelf by the clock and turned to his book-mark. By the flare of the lamp, while two of the lesser Flaters disputed which should hold the tail of the cat among the family mitts under the stove, he began to read in the First Book of the Chronicles exactly where he had left off the evening before:

‘And their brethren the sons of Merari stood on the left hand: Ethan the son of Kishi, the son of Abdi, the son of Malluch, the son of Hashabiah——’ down to the 66th verse where it seemed most convenient to break the suspense of so thrilling a story. The litanic family prayer which in fifteen years had emerged like a folksong in that household, went up again as they all knelt on the puncheon floor.

The clack and babble of breakfast came like a bedlam of haste after the solemn lento of the orisons. Mrs. Flater placidly dispensed mush, molasses, johnnycake, fried fat pork and powerful tea. Suddenly she glanced at the window and blew out the lamp. The family rose.

Long before she had packed five school lunches into three tin pails, Hiram and his hired youth were making tracks in the snow back the lane. To Hansen’s alert blue eyes the new snow flung everything into bold relief—perky little barns and smoke-spired houses against the enormous, grim eternity of the hardwood bush holding up the sky; the low log house of Norah Higgins across the Four-Rod Road; the bleak-windowed, unpainted house of Eli Snell, widower, next to Flater’s; the white frame house of the Cusack large family next the south bush; and towards the blue-smoked saw-mill village whose black smokestack Hansen could see over the snow roof, other houses were dotted lonesome against the walls of the forest; concession lines that led heaven knew where into other clearings like this of the Four-Rod Road.

Got all them wedges, Olaf? came the hammering voice of his chief ahead, nearing the bush.

Yah. I have two iron wedges and two wooden wedges; and the mawl. O.K.

The sun just peering over the eastern bush gleamed on the long cross-cut saw hung over Hiram’s left shoulder and the two axes which they had ground yesterday. Wind was scattering the smokes. It pierced Hansen’s mitts and stung his ears. The last shrill squeal of the lean shotes scrimmaging at a frozen barnyard trough fainted as the two bushmen trailed into the vast infinitude of the hardwood forest. North wind rolled like a heavenly sea over the beam-works of the great crotching tops—elms, oaks, maples, ashes, beeches, birches, hickories, basswoods, with their skins of grey, blue, silver, brown, deep red, black. Treading in the tracks of his boss, Hansen gazed at the grandeur of the first forest he had ever entered, stubbing his boots on many a snow-buried log, peering upward, inward, outward, listening to the chatter of squirrels, the cheep of chickadees, the tap of sapsuckers, the croon of a talking tree.

Far off, as though it had been miles by some sounding sea, a shrill whistle blew.

Yah. That will be seven o’clock, Mr. Flater.

They stopped under the roof of a huge swamp-elm up which the keen eyes of the bushman beaded on the trunk as he watched the wind play with the crotch. He laid the saw on a stump, stuck one axe in the snow, took off his mitts and his smock and stood by with his iron-wedged axe.

Fetch three skids, Olaf, he said tersely; and he swung the axe once, gashing grandly into the bark; thrice, blocking out a big chip.

Skids! murmured Olaf. Skids? He had never heard the word before. Hiram had a knack of supposing that a youth as tall as himself should know all that he knew. Blundering about to find anything resembling a skid Olaf stumbled over a heap of something loose. Ah! scooping off the snow with his mitts, perhaps these are—skids? Earnestly he drew forth a rough, flat, slabby thing longer than a man’s leg. He took it to the boss who had already carved a white notch in the doomed elm.

Would that be—a skid, Mr. Flater? No?

Hiram grounded his axe. You spoopendyke! That’s a cull puncheon stave.

A cull—puncheon—stave! repeated Olaf. Oh!

Stave-makers culled ’em on me years ago.

Yah. And what do they do with the good ones?

Aw blazes! Make’m into hogsheads fer blackstrap an’ rum down in Bermuda er somewheres. Skids, I said! Green saplin’ poles—that long—to bed the el’m when she falls.

Oh! That is different. Yah. He spoke dreamily as he remembered now having seen on London docks such hogsheads rolling in under the masts of the Thames. He went chopping. Oh the mystery of a forest; of an empire; of a whole world, that now seemed to be built of wood!

With Hiram’s help he bedded the elm. Each took an end of the long saw. After which the triumph of the glorifying sun on a world of forest and snow lost all its magic to Olaf. His head was in a fever, his toes half frozen, his lungs almost bursting, and his ears thumped like triphammers as he backed inch by inch away from the ring of sawdust spurting on his right leg; pausing now and then as Hiram, objurgating the elm in good Methodist fashion for sitting back on the saw, drove in the wedges. Indescribable thirst sandpapered his mouth. He gobbled snow.

Makes yeh drier’n ever, grunted Hiram. Here. Trudging to a rotten log he gashed it open, scooped a small handful of fat, torpid ants from the wood and scrunched them. Have a real drink?

Olaf grinned. Oh yah! he gasped. Like ducks! Yah—ha-ha-ha! Eating a drink! No tanks! What though—is it like?

Liddle like vingeder. Stays with yeh though. Grab that saw agin. Some son’v a seacook’ll git an el’m down ’fore we do. Gotcher second wind?

No. What is that—in this country?

You air—green! Time yeh had it.

Yah. I will get it soon. But when, Mr. Flater, will this tree begin to fall and—where shall we be to see it?

Gosh! Kingdom come if yeh don’t watch out. Oh you’ll hear gunshots up yunder ’fore she starts.

Yah. I have heard those—already!

Grannie’s ducks! Be half an hour yet. Never mind the gun noises. But say—when yeh hear me yell, yank out the saw, drop your end and go lickety split——

Hell bent fer ’lection! said Olaf repeating some phrase he had heard.

Back in yunder as fast and fur as yeh kin; becuz if that el’m starts t’lodge in that white oak and kicks back, she’ll shoot back o’ the stump like chain lightnin’. Come on now!

Wild went the saw. The gap widened. No more wedgings now. Daylight in the crack. More shots in the crotch; twitchings of the top; then—a terrible, blood-curdling yell that sent Olaf flying for refuge as the whole top of the illimitable forest seemed to be coming off at once. Sprawling flat on his face in the snow amid a clump of bluebeeches, he heard the bombardment of battles at sea, felt rather than heard the final rebounding crash of the elm which, thanks to Hiram’s cunning, did not lodge and shoot back of the stump, but clutched a ghastly gap in the roof of the bush, sent seven trees drunkenly lurching, and flung up a smoke of snow.

After the last echo had died, Olaf dared to rise and look. Limbs were still dropping from that great hole in the roof. The gaunt, grey trunk of the fallen elm sloped up from the sawn stump to the chaos of its top—and here already, calm as a clock, was Hiram Flater with the two-foot nick in the handle of his axe, measuring the trunk into log lengths for the saw.

Bowing his back over a handle of the saw, pausing for a rest only when the saw pinched and Hiram drove in wedges to lift the elm. Olaf let his vagrant mind wander into tracts of speculation. Never a word from Hiram, except once to locate the bark of a distant fox or some other bushman crashing down elms, the youth pondered on snow crystals, sermons, hymns, girls, fights, corncake and blackstrap, and what that elm at three dollars a thousand would be worth at the mill; probably $6.50, of which his share at $3.50 a month would be about six cents. After which the Jericho whistle blew and Hiram said with intense and heart-searching eloquence, Well, let’s go to dinner.

CHAPTER II.

The Jericho Corner Store.

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Zachariah Peppercorn, freckly storekeeper, chuckled at the snow. So did Shanks the blacksmith who held the Jericho side-hold wrestling record, with a fighting championship on the side. So did Collop the harnessman, as English as ale. So did Rev. Fulton the Methodist preacher with five appointments on his circuit; and Sadie Barlow the young school-ma’am of eighteen with sixty-four pupils. So did the farmers. So did everybody come into new life over the snowfall, but of all people most, Peppercorn, chief owner of the store, principal shareholder in the stave-mill and part proprietor of the cheese factory.

Snow’s the ticket, Bo! he chirped to Boanerges Brown, his clerk, whose ambition was the pulpit. Ev’ry load o’ logs means more staves at the mill, more cash at the store. Ho! There goes the Scandinavian beanpole Flater hired. Got one he-buck of a load.

Olaf felt like a monument as he rose on the snow-painted logs and saw into the roaring millyard whose sheet-iron smokestack wabbled like a black palsied finger over streets of staves, steaming bolts, lumber, slabs, bark, sawdust and noise.

Holy smoke! I wonder where to drive this?

A dwarf giant with a cant-hook arose from the log-piles, bawling, Whoa!

Oh! You are Mr. Tode Beech? I am Olaf Hansen, from Flater’s.

Yeh, Spikey. I know the team. G’loot! Wonder yeh didn’ upset. What the blazes—brown jug and oilcan on this chain?

Yah, Mrs. Flater wants molasses and kerosene.

Git that binderpole down, you bump on a log!

I won’t take any more bully talk! shouted the youth after a brief silence. I’m only seventeen, or I’d smack you!

All right, sonny, in a milder tone. Say, that nigh horse has kicked off his left hind shoe. Jeh pick it up?

Tied it on the spike of the hames, grinned Olaf. I’ll stop at the smith’s.

Ho! Bug outcher eyes on that other cant-hook, son. Ho-ope! Over she goes, as the top log fell to its bunk with a thud; the two others followed and Olaf drove jingling away with his oilcan and his brown jug, first to the blacksmith’s where Shanks shook a red-hot horseshoe at him from behind a leather apron and said, Tie up, skeesicks. Five teams ahead.

I’ll get fits for this, mused Olaf as he piked away to the store with his jug and can. Flater will be sure to say I had a fat time reading in the store. Dark purple patches loomed up from the bush; the wind was high and cold; the mail-carrier drove up stiff with a fog-blown horse as Olaf, fishing a duebill from his pocket, stalked into the hot store, amid shelves of drygoods, gallows of leg boots, barrels of sugar, caddies of tea, boxes of raisins, cases of plug tobacco, spools of thread, overalls and caps, mitts and socks, crosscut saws and axes, ribbons and candysticks, pain-killers, cherry pectorals and vanillas: a telegraph clicking behind the postoffice wicket where Z. Peppercorn sorted and stamped letters.

Where ju hail from? asked the mail-man thawing his boots.

From London, direct, was the cautious response. My father was from Norway; a ship’s captain—he was wrecked.

Got any folks in Ameriky?

One brother in Minnesota. Yah. He left me at Montreal. I told him I stay under old flag. Yah.

What’s the odds, what flag, long as yeh got three squares a day? Hustle y’r hooks, Zach. I’m late.

The mail-bag was chucked over the counter and the store began to thicken with people of various accents to whom news, cheaper than goods, was sometimes quite as important. Peppercorn oscillated between the letter cage and the counters; Boanerges was busy with a new consignment of coal-oil in the shed; so Olaf settled down on a nail keg in an alcove of barrels near the overhang of boots and, as he clanked his can and jug at intervals in a vain effort to get attention, he gazed at the ambidextrous storekeeper whom from his economic patter he felt sure he never should learn to like.

Axehandles—yep! to a pair of pack-laden, raven-haired Chippewas who moccasined like glimmering ghosts of dusk into the store. Baskits? Not on your tintype! Handles—twenty apiece. Good hickory? Hunkadory, I’ll take the lot. Tobac, Tom? Sure. Try a few yards turkey-red skirt fer the missis. Three yards? Cod-liver oil, two bottles. Skedaddle! Vamoose! Hullo Mag. Moss! to a broadfaced beaming girl with a basket and a pink woollen cloud round her head. Who’s buzzin’ you now since Ebbie went to Saginaw? Here’s a Saginaw letter. Blush now. Kck! Sleigh-bells, wedding-bells—eh parson? as a hefty, whiskered man came in stamping and blowing, got his Christian Guardian and began to read at the stove.

Well, coughed the parson as he elevated a felt leg-boot to the stove damper, I’m sure I shall be happy to tie the glad knot any day, so long as Maggie marries a good Christian and continues to help in the church.

That’s the ticket, sir, winked Peppercorn. Boom Jericho and the church rings the bell. Now Mag, what’s the order?

You’re a windy old gossip, blushed Maggie. Wonder you don’t go the whole hog and sell marriage licenses.

As lief do it as not, turning up a lamp. Hullo—well for the love o’ Mary Ann, here’s Ben Briggs from Cleveland, Ohio. Put ’er there, Ben. How’s tricks? Buyin’ el’m eh? That’s the ticket. Yankee dollars make the Canadian mare go. Farmers poor as a church mouse swallowed by a Job’s turkey. So Cleveland’s lively, eh? Gosh! Wish I c’d run a store there.

A brief hiatus in the monologue permitted the beaver-collared Clevelander, whose home village was in Bruce county, Ont., to light a cigar and remark in a ponderous tromboning voice:

The home town of John D. Rockefeller, sir, is humming like a top. Standard Oil, Zach, is goana be the biggest one-man show on this planet. Why you can’t sell that boy there, pointing to Olaf who had risen eager and slouchy over the barrels, a gallon of A-1 oil without paying dividends to John D. Every lampwick in Ameriky——

Peppercorn gave a very adenoidal cough.

Say—listen, went on Briggs. In less’n twenty years these bushwhackers’ll quit sellin’ el’m and start buyin’ Standard Oil for cookstoves. I tell you, there aint much of anything in Canady except C.P.R. that Uncle Sam wunt get dividends on, and it wunt matter a hoop in Hades whether this country is high tariff or free trade, becuz he’s got the world’s greatest industrial system right now, and all Canady’s smokestacks one on top o’ the rest wouldn’t be anything more to him than a totem-pole in British Columby. How do I know? Becuz I was born in Bruce county, Ont., starved out of it and hit the trail to prosperity.

Wait! snapped Olaf intensely, brandishing his oilcan. What about electric energy and Niagara Falls? Yah. What about the factories and merchant ships of Great Britain? Yah. What about Canadians who come to stay in Canada? Yah-yah!

Then came the cataract of amateur economics which for nights, loafing at the store to pick up news and views and impressions, Olaf had been damming up. He was right in the foam of it and could not stop when the door banged open and a helterskelter of little muffled-up children came storming in with a rosy-faced, sparkle-eyed girl in a Tam and feather and long ulster all pelted with snow.

Hullo Sadie! said Peppercorn softly as she shook hands with Briggs, who said the same. Never mind the big noise—only a geeser from Norway.

She paused to look at Olaf who, the moment he caught the serious animation on her fine face, became as mum as the First Bookers Sadie was shepherding home in the storm.

Please to excuse me, Miss? he said huskily. I am Olaf Hansen from Flater’s. Mrs. Flater says often she wishes you would come—to see them again; and some day hopes to have organ for to play. Yah.

Well, I’m sure it’s nice to know you, Olaf. Perhaps you’ll come to school some day?

Oh, that would be wonderful. Yah. But——

Letters, Sadie, interrupted Peppercorn. Hull grist o’ them; and Briggs from Cleveland said, "Sadie, say, that song Florence Nightingale you sang here last winter—that’s a pippin, aint it parson?; and the preacher at the door said, Yes, but Miss Barlow sings gospel songs best of all."

Want anything? asked Peppercorn gruffly of Olaf.

A gallon of kerosene and a jug of molasses on Mrs. Flater’s duebill for socks and mittens—yah, here it is, said Olaf slowly. And please not to call me a geeser again—or anything like it. Geysers are Icelandic.

Soy it agin an’ soy it slow! growled Peppercorn.

Olaf got his goods and trudged swiftly back to the blacksmith shop where Shanks, just closing up, said:

Well spoopendyke, I sharpshod the team. That whatcheh wanted?

Oh holy smoke! gasped Olaf. I meant just one shoe. Yah. Oh dammit!

Cold with apprehension about Flater and his wrath he drove away, hustled the team to the barn, put down hay and shoved in bed-straw for the horses, waited till he was sure supper was done and went in.

No supper for me, thanks! as the whole family hushed to his coming in. Here is the oil and the molasses; also the newspaper.

Silently Hiram took the Plainsville Reformer and pretended to read while Cornelia put the children to bed. Olaf took a new sewing machine catalogue left by an agent that day and sat on the wood-box. Presently Hiram lighted a lantern and went out. Cornelia began to sew a shirt. Olaf observed her rather handsome face and her fresh polka dot dress as a sort of flower of the spotless white kitchen.

I think you are marvellous! he blurted. Yah. I know he is mad. He can dock wages from me for the horseshoes and the lost load of hauling. He put the catalogue on the oilcloth by the lamp. Did you buy the sewing-machine—no? Too bad! So much cost. So many——for clothes. Good-night!

He took his lamp and went upstairs as Hiram came in, blew out the lantern and without taking down the bootjack as usual said, Kinda thought I heerd a fox barkin’ in the lane. But that was only a preamble to a more conclusive statement. Well fer a dunderhead that Olaf takes the cake. Olaf, surmising some such certificate of character, continued to read his precious Tyndall. Bet he wuz readin’ his head off in the store, same as he does drivin’ on the road. Can’t——

Considering that the epigram he was about to utter was too valuable for Cornelia alone, he opened the staircase door and called, Olaf! Fetch down them books.

Flushed and smiling, Olaf came down with four books which he laid on the table.

Yeh can’t drive a team right and read a book any more’n yeh c’n whistle an’ chew a meal, elucidated Hiram.

Olaf folded his arms. I have told Mrs. Flater you can dock me on wages for the shoes and the lost load of hauling, he repeated.

You borried them books from Eli Snell, and yeh know what he is.

Yah. The preacher calls him infidel; but he says the preacher is a humbug.

Tt! Tt! deprecated Cornelia.

Olaf repeated the titles as a kind of song:

"Tyndall’s Forms of Water, about steam, frost, ice, snow crystals;

"Disraeli’s Speeches, of a Jew who became Premier;

"Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, to show that in the civilization of money the rich become richer and the poor become poorer."

And what’s the other one? Hiram touched it as cautiously as though it had been a dead snake.

"Descent of Man, by