I RACKED my brain for the best means of furthering my material prospects. I might have secured an appointment in the city; but I hesitated. Life in the city involves an enormous amount of lost motion. Let him who thinks that half an hour's street-car ride may enable him to relax try that expedient; unless he has been used to it all his life, he will find it impossible. Further, I wanted to feel surer of myself than I did before I struck for what most of my colleagues would have considered the grand prize of the teaching career in Manitoba. For the moment I rather wanted the principalship of a high school or a specialist's position in a collegiate institute, preferably that of a language master. Fortunately, the provincial Superintendent of Education had become my friend; and he made it his business to find for me what I wanted.
     My wife resigned her position early in spring; and about the same time I had the offer of the position as master of mathematics - of all things! - in the Collegiate Institute at Virden, in the western part of the province, at a salary of fourteen hundred dollars a year. The principal of that school, I was told confidentially, was nearing his retirement; if I made a success of my work, I should be in line as his successor. That success, I had not the slightest doubt, I could make in any department whatever.
     I should, of course, have to regularize my standing by taking a degree; but that, I felt, was a mere matter of arrangement between the university and myself. I never thought that, hide-bound as the university naturally is, I should be required to start at the bottom.

     When the holidays came, we had mapped out the following year. My wife went home for a brief visit; and I went to Winnipeg to read examination papers. Her confinement was expected late in July or early in August.
     About the middle of July I went to Virden where, for the moment, I could find only a single vacant house; and it could not be considered as anything but a makeshift. It stood at the outskirts of the town, along its northern limit; but it was opposite the hospital where my wife would have to await her confinement. I furnished it in the scantiest manner, knowing that we should shortly have to move again; the mere distance from the school made that imperative. Fortunately, before leaving town, I came across another house which would be vacant before long and which would do us admirably.
     I went to fetch my wife; and by the last week of the month we were provisionally installed. On August 5 a little girl was born, in the hospital, and received the name May.
     Within a month we moved into a good house near the school where I had meanwhile begun my work. As it turned out, there were once more tasks which I had not bargained for; once more I had to teach extra hours. As at Winkler no third-grade class had been taught before I took over the school, so, here, no provision had so far been made for teaching the senior-matriculation grade for which there had been no call. That call now developed; and I had to volunteer, in addition to all the mathematics, for a class in senior English.
     But fate resolved to play me another little trick.
     In spite of the fact that, for seven or eight months, my wife and I had both been earning money, there were no reserves to speak of; my payments to the school supply

house had kept me poor. But I had made a success of this profession new to me; and, for the sake of a human contact, I had resigned myself to a life ________ to borrow a phrase from Euripides. If I cared to follow it up, there was undoubtedly a career ahead of me; everybody said so; why should I doubt it? For the moment, only one thing seemed indicated: I must externalize my aims. In that mood, I became a convert to the great American philosophy of sales-felicity. I believe I have mentioned that I have expensive tastes. I might have been satisfied with very little; but that little had to be "good" in Arnold Bennett's sense of the word. I furnished the new house on the time-payment plan.
     By Christmas it had become clear that the University of Manitoba had no intention of admitting that anyone not trained in its august halls might have the modicum of knowledge required for a degree. I had to write on the childish examinations of the first year of an arts course. The result brought the one concession that was made to me; I was informed that, in spring, instead of proceeding with the first year, I might write on the second year. After that, I having elected to proceed with two "majors" - French and German - two more examinations would see me through.
     So far, then, all had gone well. It is true, I was now paying the greater part of my salary to the furniture dealers instead of the supply house; but, when the furniture was paid for, it would at least be unquestionably ours.
     Then, early in January, I came down with pneumonia. This being my second attack of this insidious disease, I made heavy weather of it. I was delirious from the start; but I stubbornly refused to go to the hospital. At first, my wife had a nurse to assist her; then, I having

taken so violent a dislike to that nurse that it seemed to endanger my life, she engaged an inexperienced girl to help her at least with the house-work. Shortly, however, even that girl had to be dismissed under financial pressure.
     Henceforth, during that long illness of mine, my wife looked after a rather large house, cared for a baby, and nursed a man sick even unto death. Before the girl was dismissed, there had been one occasion on which my wife's fatigue was so great that, having lain down on her bed for a moment's rest, in the afternoon, she did not wake till the evening of the next day; she slept while a neighbour looked after the most necessary things.
     Of all which, happily, I lay unconscious in that delirium which was to last for week after week. More than once, during that time, the doctor thought it his duty to prepare my wife for the worst by telling her that he did not expect me to live till morning.
     Had I died at that time, the manuscripts of a few books, mostly novels, would have been found among my papers; and most probably they would have been destroyed. I am not sure, today, but that such a course of events would, all round, have been for the best!
     But the fact was that I did not die. The moment the delirium subsided, after having sometimes frightened the young woman taking care of me almost out of her wits, I began to put up a stubborn fight for life. Pneumonia was followed by pleurisy; and once more I was in danger. Strange to say, while lying, day after day, fighting off death, I planned and planned - literary work; a preoccupation which I shed as soon as I was on my feet again.
     It was late in spring before I returned to school. I realized at once that, in this town, my fair prospects were

blasted. The position to which I aspired demanded good health as the prime requisite. I made it easy for the school-board and resigned. Shortly I applied for, and obtained, the principalship of the high school at Gladstone, in the north-central part of the province.
     When I was earning my salary again, my wife and I cast up accounts. What with the remainder of our debt on the furniture, the doctor's bills, and the credits my wife had been in need of for food and fuel, we found that, at the end of the term, we should owe nine hundred and sixty-one dollars!
     I called a meeting of my creditors and put the case before them. All were most reasonable and agreed without difficulty to my proposals. I asked them to give me a year's time, with current interest added to the accounts. It seemed impossible to keep my word, but I gave it; and I might say right here that it was not broken. Out of a salary of fourteen hundred I cleared off my Virden debt, plus interest, over a thousand dollars in all; though, at the cost of assuming a new debt, at Gladstone, of over two hundred dollars.
     All of which may seem trifling and unimportant; but it helped to shape matters in such a way as to make the final, grand conflict of my life inevitable; and in that conflict, and its understanding, resides the justification of this record.
     From the start, the atmosphere at Gladstone was unpleasant; and many things contributed to make it so.
     Socially, we lived, apart from the Anglican minister's family, in as complete an isolation as at Winkler. The war psychosis was taking hold of the country; it was 1916; and I had, of course, never made a secret of the fact that I had not been born in Canada. To many,

there was no difference between a Canadian of foreign extraction and an "enemy alien". For decades I had felt myself to be a Canadian in a sense that went far beyond a mere civic adherence or dynastic allegiance; compared with my feeling of identification with the interests of the west, even formal naturalization was a mere irrelevancy; I had struck spiritual root in the pioneer districts of Canada. The fact of Canada's still colonial status was of no importance to me; what bound me was precisely what was new in the country; what was unique. On the other hand, what could the people of Gladstone know about that? Could I even try to explain it to them? I should have had to speak an English to them as foreign as, let me say, Czech. I had not even published any one of my books.
     From the beginning, I was periodically tempted to throw up my work; but we lived in a state of economic bondage. As we shall see, I have, with brief interruptions, lived in a state of economic bondage ever since.
     Besides, I had found out by that time that some church affiliation was obligatory for any teacher in a small town in Canada; and I did not mean to hurt people's feelings. Very naturally, then, not knowing the conditions in this town, we had made the connection with the Anglican church to which I, at least, had nominally belonged from early childhood. Innocently, we were made to share in the extreme and quite unreasonable unpopularity of the then incumbent and his wife. I am not sure but that this unpopularity was, to a certain extent, understandable; but at least the man's worst offence was no more than an error of judgment. He was an exceptionally good preacher and personally unimpeachable; but he had come from England and had tried to run his church in the manner of the old-fashioned, patriarchal rector who is not

so much the servant as the spiritual director of his congregation. Having made the connection, I felt it my duty to stand by him in the extraordinary entanglement into which his autocratic ways had led him. Unfortunately, his congregation comprised a good deal of what many called the "riff-raff" of the place; and that riffraff is peculiarly offensive in a small town. A shameful attempt was made - discountenanced, but not defeated, by the better elements - not only to oust him from his incumbency, but to do so without paying him his stipend which was many months overdue. After prolonged consultations with the better class of Anglicans who were holding back and not coming to church, I induced him to place his case entirely in my hands. I told him that he would have to go; but, at parishioners' meeting after meeting, I fought the irresponsible part of the congregation back step by step; often standing before them under a shower of outright abuse until he received, not indeed justice, but at least the arrears of his stipend and what time he needed to secure another call. Whereupon he could save his face by withdrawing of his own accord.
     When he left, I fell heir to his unpopularity, at least among a majority of the numerous Anglican contingent of the town.
     Add to that what, a few years later, I said of the situation in the Introduction to Over Prairie Trails; and think further of our desperate poverty, and you will admit that there was justification for my desire to leave as soon as I could. But, of course, I did not for a moment consider the possibility of leaving before I had secured another position financially at least as good. However, we were by that time in the middle of the first term.
     It so happened that, during that first fall at Gladstone,

it fell to my share to preside over a teachers' convention held in the town. At my suggestion, the Deputy Minister for the province was invited to be our "guest-speaker"; and a day or so after the convention had opened, he confided to me that, at least partly, he had accepted the invitation because he had wished for some time to have a talk with me.
     This talk we had the next day during a walk out of town. He knew, of course, that I was at last regularizing my standing by taking a degree; we laughed over the difficulties which the university had put in my way. "You'll overcome that," he said.
     This, then, was what the Deputy Minister had to say to me. There was a career ahead in the Civil Service of the province for men of my scholarship and ability. Had it not been for the war, he hinted, and the economies made necessary by that war, such a position might have been offered before this. "But," he concluded, "once this war is over. . ." And he left the sentence unfinished.
     To explain, I should perhaps say that I had begun to be in demand, at various educational meetings, as a public speaker. Most of my addresses were of an inspirational character; but occasionally I had come into the open as an advocate of certain reforms which would break through the hide-bound traditions of the educational system then in force. Much of what I advocated at the time has since been incorporated in the curricula of various provinces. I do not mean to say that my activities had any influence on this development; though, here and there, they may have contributed towards clarifying ideas which, as the saying goes, were in the air.
     Since I have touched on the question of the degree, I might say that, in writing off the third-year examinations,

with majors in French and German, I ranked first on the aggregate in both subjects and was, therefore, nominally awarded two scholarships of a hundred and fifty dollars each; nominally - for payment of the amounts being conditional upon attendance at the university, I forfeited both to the next-in-line. It has been my fate throughout life, in all material things. It was always the next-in-line who got the prizes.
     Meanwhile the war was far from won; and as it dragged on, bitterness increased on both sides.
     Meanwhile, also, the less congenial my surroundings became, the more insistently did my old aims and aspirations try to raise their buried heads; for the first time in my married life I felt out-of-sorts. I did not let my wife know of this; for I felt emphatically that, while marriage had a great deal to do with it, my wife certainly had not.
     The little girl, now in her second year, was a sheer delight. Unfortunately we were, for economy's sake, once more living in an apartment above a store where she could not have the outdoor life which she should have had. I had no night work at Gladstone; in fact, no extra work of any kind; and the modicum of leisure which I enjoyed was, therefore, divided between reading and devoting myself to my wife and child.
     If, in spite of that, the happiness I enjoyed was not entirely unclouded, the very fact that there was leisure bore its share of responsibility. Old preoccupations which had lain dormant for four years were bound to haunt me the moment I was not rushed from morning to night. At last I spoke of them to my wife.
     Her reaction was characteristic. I remember with particular distinctness one evening when, having talked of something on which a paragraph I had written years

ago had some bearing, I read her the score of lines composing it.
     "A man," she said with decision, "who can write like that should not waste his time teaching."
     On another occasion we were talking about town life. I mentioned that all town surroundings, with what they implied, namely, the preoccupation with what appeared to me to be irrelevant trifles, were profoundly repellent to me; that I was an outdoor man, with rural sympathies and tastes.
     I had no ulterior motive in doing so; I was simply stating a fact. My success as a teacher had remained most exceptional; I had, so far, no desire to jeopardize it by any incautious move; even the prospects held out to me had not yet lost their attraction. I had married; I meant to carve a career for myself which, in my wife's eyes, would justify that marriage.
     But my wife was clear-sighted enough to see that I was holding certain things back. I did. I did so unconsciously and, of course, without the slightest intention of deceiving her with regard to the state of my mind. In the long days while I was at school, she pondered the problem; and she unravelled or divined enough to see that there was a problem. Was there a way for her to solve it for me?
     One day, tentatively, she broached a plan which she put forward as one of her desires. She was a born teacher, she said; she could not reconcile herself to the idea that her teaching days were over. Besides, she wished for nothing better than to help in solving our economic problems. Suppose she went back to teaching for a year, just to see how things might work out. The teaching week, she argued, consisted of only five days; if she took a

school near enough to Gladstone, she could come home every week-end; or, alternatively, I could come to her.
     The idea was planted.
     The chief difficulty, of course, was the little girl; to her, any apparent break-up of the family life might spell tragedy.
     Spring was on its way; spring came at last; and nothing had been done. Examinations began and ended. The public-school grades were still at work; but I was free.
     Meanwhile I had been searching for a different solution of the economic problem. We had succeeded in reducing, within a single year, our total indebtedness from a thousand dollars to less than a quarter of that amount. In other words, more than half my salary had been applied on the debt; less than one-fifth of another year's earnings would clear us completely, always provided that my health held out. But the holidays which were coming remained unprovided for.
     In the northern reaches of the province, or of that part of the province which was more or less settled, there were certain schools which, on account of the lack of roads, were operated only in summer. They opened in May or June and continued open until late in the fall; until, in fact, it became impossible for children to travel afoot over distances of two, three, four miles. My holidays lasted for two months only; but some of these schools had remained without teachers for years. Might I not find one which would be glad enough to have me for even those two months?
     I discussed the question with the local inspector of public schools whose territory extended for some fifty miles north where it adjoined the inspectorate of the town

of Dauphin. He welcomed the idea; and before long he brought me word that he could secure for me, at a monthly salary of sixty-five dollars, a school in a mixed Icelandic and Scotch district skirting the shores of Lake Manitoba. In later writings of mine the district figures under the Icelandic name of Hnafur; its real name was Leifur.
     Occasionally I accompanied this inspector on short trips through his territory; and so I became sufficiently acquainted with him to mention our economic difficulties and the way in which my wife proposed to deal with them.
     He promptly explained to me an institution new in the province; that of the office of the "official trustee". This trustee, a Civil Servant under the provincial government, was then building a number of schools in pioneer, non-Canadian districts, to be opened shortly, and to be administered from Winnipeg. All these schools, such was the scheme, were to be provided with so-called teacherages, small cottages, that is, which were to serve as teachers' residences. If I cared to come along with him on an extended day's trip, he would be glad to show me one or two of them; and if my wife really wished to teach again, what with the ever-growing scarcity of teachers, especially qualified teachers, he would be glad to pass the word on to the official trustee; so far, she could have her pick of such schools as would open in midsummer.
     Now, though I tentatively accepted my wife's plan which she defended as a wish of her own, I was, of course, bound to find the nearest of these schools - one which would be within easy reach from Gladstone; for the financial success of the scheme depended on my retaining the principalship. My wife agreed that I should go; and the moment examinations were over, I went.

     Partly, of course, I went because I did not know what would happen to me and what it would imply for us in the future.
     For up there, in that bush-country which we entered within an hour of what was then fast driving from Gladstone, we were in precisely the sort of country with which not a few of my novels dealt, whether they were written or only planned; we were on the frontier of civilization; for years I had been homesick for it.
     Much of the forest which we traversed, travelling over sandy roads or over mere trails, was still untouched by the hand of man; the poplar prevailed, both aspen and balsam; but there were occasional moss-cupped oaks and frequent colonies of spruces and larches, especially the latter. Though the homesteads which were scattered throughout this forest land were of the regular size, a hundred and sixty acres, most of them had only a few acres of cleared land to show; they were still, very largely, as they should have been left. Large areas, it was true, were ravaged by forest fires; and of these the great willow-herb had taken undisputed possession.
     Once more something clicked in my mind; this was the landscape in which Niels Lindstedt had lived; Len Sterner; Mrs. Lund; and many other creatures of my brain. As the car proceeded over the outrageous roads, I slipped into a state of profound excitement.
     Suddenly, coming from the west, we emerged in a desolate landscape of burnt-over forest and low-lying swamp; and on a gravel ridge - an ancient lateral moraine of the retreating ice-age - a brand-new building stood before my eyes: it was the "Plymouth School" of Over Prairie Trails.

     The nearest farm was a mile away. The desolation of it all touched the innermost chords of my soul and made them vibrate.
     It was nothing short of a revelation. I was at home here. I had not known what the last few years had done to me by removing me from my true environment. I had not known that I was so scarred with suffering, by that career which had opened before me. I had not known -or had I? - that, for me, nothing whatever counted, neither honour nor wealth, neither security nor even domestic happiness, when it interfered with my work. If I were living here, I should resume that work.
     The conflict between this revelation which I had received and the obligation under which my marriage had placed me defined itself with a clearness that was cruel.
     We alighted to look the premises over; for the inspector had to give a report on the progress made. He knew the whole district, of course; and he detailed to me its articulation, through roads and trails, to the civilized world which held it clasped on three sides.
     We were thirty-four miles straight north of Gladstone, separated from it, first by a fringe of forest a few miles wide, and then due south, by what was called the Big Marsh. This distance we had covered in a round-about way travelling fifty miles or so. Seven miles east lay the town of Amaranth; twenty-two miles west, the town of Glenella, not far from the foot of the Riding Mountains which continue the Pembina Mountains northward; there, the main line of the C.N.R. carried modern means of transportation another sixty miles or so to the north, while Amaranth was, so far, the end of steel in the east. Between the main line of the C.N.R. and the lake, great

forests swept towards the Arctic, via the lake-and-rock country of the North-West Territories which offered no limit to the imagination.
     The school which the inspector had picked for my summer work was only twenty-six miles away. To reach it from here, I should have to go to Amaranth first, then north for nine miles, then east again for another ten. The nine-mile stretch north lay all the way over the so-called Big Ridge, the largest of the great moraines which scored all this country, running roughly from north to south. Subsequently to its being laid down as a moraine, it had formed the shore of the receding waters of Lake Manitoba; and its surface layers had been stratified by wave action into marvellous smoothness, unmarred, so far, by the havoc which, within the next decades, mechanized traffic was to make of it.
     While to others life here in this desolation might seem exile, to me it held forth a promise of paradise. If I could live here as a married man, I could combine the two great satisfactions for which I craved: I could plant an island of domestic life in the wilderness; and I could write again. For, long ago, by virtue of the books I had written, the wilderness had become my real home.
     When, at night, we returned to Gladstone, I must have been feverish; in reporting to my wife, I am afraid, I used glowing language. I never thought of the fact that hers had been a sheltered life; that she had never lived where, at night, the wolves were sniffing at the door.
     She caught my enthusiasm; and the only thing which gave her pause was the fact that the distance was thirty-four miles in a direct line and that there was no railway connecting the district with the town. For even in order to reach Amaranth where the train penetrated only twice

a week, I should first have had to go south to Portage La Prairie, a detour of over ninety miles. That there were not even direct roads - connections which could be called roads - I did not mention. I was willing to leave difficulties to be dealt with as they arose.
     So far I should get a bicycle; later, when snow came, I should get a horse; perhaps, for the worst part of the winter, two horses; I promised that I should be with her every week-end - a promise which I kept, if only after a fashion, for what we called week-ends sometimes dwindled to a few hours.
     The arrangements were soon made. Both my wife and I were to open school on July 1st. At least the printed agreements signed by us called for that date; and so we never thought of the fact that July 1st was Dominion Day. The official trustee at Winnipeg assured us that Plymouth School - as it is called in my books -its real name was Falmouth - would be ready to open; and that the cottage was fully furnished apart from linen, curtains, and bedding which my wife would have to take.
     We set out on June 29, a Saturday, hiring a car for the purpose of moving us in. The back seat was piled high with bundles, chiefly of bedding; suitcases were strapped to the left-hand running board; my bicycle I held on the one to the right. In order to reach our seats, we had to climb over the doors.
     The weather looked threatening; and the driver who did not know the roads over which we should have to pass was in a hurry. Having been engaged a few days ahead, he had made his enquiries; but his information dealt only with the main landmarks. Since the straight road north led over stretches which it might be impossible for a car to travel in rain, we went east, towards the lake,

until we struck the Big Ridge which continues south almost as far as Portage La Prairie. Having reached it within an hour, we turned north, to Amaranth, a desolate little village consisting of a dozen houses, two stores, a boarding-house, and the railway station. The population presented a mixture of Russo-Germans, Swedes, Ice-landers, Armenians, Jews, and Indians or half-breeds.
     Here my wife bought a bag of flour, for she knew that she would have to bake her own bread; and then we turned west, along that road of which much has been said in The Turn of the Year. The distance was only seven miles now but the road, which every now and then degenerated into a mere trail, led, for long stretches, through a watery sort of muskeg bridged by corduroy, poplar trees being laid across it to keep it from sinking away into the fens. Perhaps once in two miles we passed an incipient farmstead.
     First of all we went on to the school where we found everything locked and nobody about, in spite of the fact that the inspector had advised the man who was temporarily in charge. A glance through the windows showed that there was no furniture of any description in the cottage. The place gave us a chill reception.
     But we unloaded the baggage in the diminutive porch where we could only hope the rain which threatened would not reach it. Then, since the driver meant to return via Amaranth in any case, we resumed our seats in the car and were soon speeding east again, to hunt for the man whose name had been given us by the inspector of schools as that of the holder of the keys.
     By this time, the driver's demand for hurry had become pressing. Huge, low-hanging clouds were trailing hems