To this very day these yellow grades of the pioneer
country along the lake lie like naked scars on Nature's
body: ugly raw, as if the bowels were torn out of a
beautiful bird and left to dry and rot on its plumage.
Age will mellow them down into harmony.
Peter had walked for nearly half an hour. The ditch was
north of the grade. I had passed, without seeing it, a
newly cut-out road to the north which led to a lonesome
schoolhouse in the bush. As always when I passed or
thought of it, I had wondered where through this
wilderness-tangle of bush and brush the children came
from to fill it--walking through winter-snows, through
summer-muds, for two, three, four miles or more to get
their meagre share of the accumulated knowledge of the
world. And the teacher! Was it the money? Could it be
when there were plenty of schools in the thickly settled
districts waiting for them? I knew of one who had come
to this very school in a car and turned right back when
she saw that she was expected to live as a boarder on a
comfortless homestead and walk quite a distance and teach
mostly foreign-born children. It had been the money with
her! Unfortunately it is not the woman--nor the man
either, for that matter--who drives around in a car, that
will buckle down and do this nation's work! I also knew
there were others like myself who think this backwoods
bushland God's own earth and second only to Paradise--but
few! And these young girls that quake at their loneliness
and yet go for a pittance and fill a mission! But was
not my wife of their very number?
I started up.
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