A Prairie Courtship by Harold Bindloss

It was early in the evening when they drove into sight of the Hunter homestead, and as they approached it Alison glanced about her with some curiosity. Long rows of clods out of which rose a tangle of withered grass tussocks stretched across the foreground. Thorne told her that this was the breaking, land won from the prairie too late for sowing in the previous year. Farther on, they skirted another stretch of more friable and cleaner clods, shattered and mellowed by the frost, and then they came to a space of charred stubble. Beyond that, a waste of yellow straw stood almost knee-high, and Thorne said that as the latter had no value on the prairie it was generally burned off to clear the ground for the following crop. He added that wheat was usually grown on the same land for several years without any attempt at fertilization.

Alison, however, knew nothing of farming, and it was the house at which she gazed with most interest. It stood not far from a broad shallow lake with a thin birch bluff on one side of it, a commodious two-storied building with a wide veranda. It was apparently built of wood, but its severity of outline was relieved by gaily picked-out scroll-work and lattice shutters; and in front of the entrance somebody had attempted to make a garden. The stables and barns behind it were new frame buildings, and there were wire fences stretching back from these. After her experience of the last few days, Alison had not expected to see anything like it in western Canada.