want. The bad bread and the whey her sound little economy converted somehow into round limbs and rosy cheeks—no doubt this hill air and wide light helped. The balls and dolls and other playthings that other children get given them, Paulie gave herself. She made dollies of the foxglove ladies, boats of the green flax, golden crowns of capeweed for her mother’s silver head—Eva was grey at twenty-five—and the field-mice infants, and those grotesque little pigmies that are baby larks, were her own babies, to be visited daily in their own little wharés—but never, never, never frightened!
It was among Eva’s worst privations that the child could have no schooling. She lived too far from the settlement school-house, for one thing; and, for another, she was too useful to her father. Joel had put up no fences on his land; he grudged, of course, both the material and the work. On the one hand, Dodds, his neighbour, and therefore, from Joel’s point of view, of necessity his enemy—objected to trespassing cattle, and often impounded them. So Joel made a human fence out of his little daughter. She had to be out at daybreak every morning, seeking the strayed things; and she had to spend the whole day, wet or fine, snowy or scorching hot, in looking after them.
Fortunately she was a hardy little thing; she took after her father’s Border ancestors physically, although in soul she was her mother’s own daughter, sweet, patient, and submissive. All that Eva could, she taught her; out upon the hillside of an afternoon, by the firelight of an evening when Joel was away, as he often was, for days together. Reading,
