In my mental vision I saw beeches and elms and walnut trees around a squire’s place in the old country.

The road began to be lined with thickets of shrubs here: choke cherry bushes, with some ripe, dried-up black berries left on the branches, with iron-black bark, and with wiry stems, in the background; in front of them, closer to the driveway, hawthorn, rich with red fruit; rosebushes with scarlet leaves reaching down to nearly underfoot. It is one of the most pleasing characteristics of our native thickets that they never rise abruptly. Always they shade off through cushionlike copses of smaller growth into the level ground around.

The sun was sinking. I knew a mile or less further north I should have to turn west in order to avoid rough roads straight ahead. That meant doubling up, because some fifteen miles or so north I should have to turn east again, my goal being east of my starting place. These fifteen or sixteen miles of the northward road I did not know; so I was anxious to make them while I could see. I looked at the moon – I could count on some light from her for an hour or so after sundown. But although I knew the last ten or twelve miles of my drive fairly well, I was also aware of the fact that there were in it tricky spots – forkings of mere trails in muskeg bush – where leaving the beaten log-track might mean as much as being lost. So I looked at my watch again and shook the lines over Peter’s back. The first six miles had taken me nearly fifty minutes. I looked at the sun again, rather anxiously. I could count on him for another hour and a quarter – well and good then!

There was the turn. Just north of it, far back from both roads, another farmyard. Behind it – to the north, stretched out, a long windbreak of poplars, with a gap or a vista in its centre. Barn and outbuildings were unpainted, the house white; a not unpleasing group, but something slovenly about it. I saw with my mind’s eye numerous children, rather neglected, uncared for, an overworked, sickly woman, a man who was bossy and harsh.

The road angles here. Bell’s farm consists of three quartersections; the southwest quarter lends its diagonal for the trail. I had hardly made the turn, however, when a car came to meet me. It stopped. The school-inspector of the district looked out. I drew in and returned his greeting, half annoyed at being thus delayed. But his very next word made me sit up. He had that morning inspected my wife’s school and seen her and my little girl; they were both as well as they could be. I felt so glad that I got out of my buggy to hand him my pouch of tobacco, which he took readily enough. He praised my wife’s work, as no doubt he had reason to do, and I should have given him a friendly slap on the shoulder, had not just then my horse taken it into his head to walk away without me.

I believe I was whistling when I got back to the buggy seat. I know I slapped the horse’s rump with my lines and sang out, “Get up, Peter, we still have a matter of nearly thirty miles to make.”

The road becomes pretty much a mere trail here, a ruttrack, smooth enough in the rut, where the wheels ran, but rough for the horse’s feet in between.

To the left I found the first untilled land. It stretched far away to the west, overgrown with shrub-willow, wolfwillow and symphoricarpus – a combination that is hard to break with the plow. I am fond of the silver grey, leathery foliage of the wolf-willow which is so characteristic of our native woods. Cinquefoil, too, the shrubby variety, I saw in great numbers – another one of our native dwarf shrubs which, though decried as a weed, should figure as a border plant in my millionaire’s park.

And as if to make my enjoyment of the evening’s drive supreme, I saw the first flocks of my favourite bird, the gold-finch. All over this vast expanse, which many would have called a waste, there were strings of them, chasing each other in their wavy flight, twittering on the downward stretch, darting in among the bushes, turning with incredible swiftness and sureness of wing the shortest of curves about a branch, and undulating away again to where they came from.

To the east I had, while pondering over the beautiful wilderness, passed a fine bluff of stately poplars that stood like green gold in the evening sun.