“Pioneers, O pioneers”
If you had stood on the borders of Askatoon, a prairie
town, on the pathway to the Rockies one late August
day not many years ago, you would have heard a fresh
young human voice singing into the morning, as its
possessor looked, from a coat she was brushing, out
over the “field of the cloth of gold,”
which your eye has already been invited to see.
With the gift of singing for joy at all, you should
be able to sing very joyously at twenty-two.
This morning singer was just that age; and if you
had looked at the golden carpet of wheat stretching
for scores of miles, before you looked at her, you
would have thought her curiously in tone with the
scene. She was a symphony in gold—nothing
less. Her hair, her cheeks, her eyes, her skin,
her laugh, her voice they were all gold. Everything
about her was so demonstratively golden that you might
have had a suspicion it was made and not born; as though
it was unreal, and the girl herself a proper subject
of suspicion. The eyelashes were so long and
so black, the eyes were so topaz, the hair was so like
such a cloud of gold as would be found on Joan of
Are as seen by a mediaeval painter, that an air of
faint artificiality surrounded what was in every other
way a remarkable effort of nature to give this region,
where she was so very busy, a keynote.
Poseurs have said that nature is garish or exaggerated
more often than not; but it is a libel. She
is aristocratic to the nth degree, and is never over
done; courage she has, but no ostentation. There
was, however, just a slight touch of over-emphasis
in this singing-girl’s presentation—that
you were bound to say, if you considered her quite
apart from her place in this nature-scheme. She
was not wholly aristocratic; she was lacking in that
high, social refinement which would have made her
gold not so golden, her black eyelashes not so black.
Being unaristocratic is not always a matter of birth,
though it may be a matter of parentage.
Her parentage was honest and respectable and not exalted.
Her father had been an engineer, who had lost his
life on a new railway of the West. His widow
had received a pension from the company insufficient
to maintain her, and so she kept boarders, the coat
of one of whom her daughter was now brushing as she
sang. The widow herself was the origin of the
girl’s slight disqualification for being of that
higher circle of selection which nature arranges long
before society makes its judicial decision.
The father had been a man of high intelligence, which
his daughter to a real degree inherited; but the mother,
as kind a soul as ever lived, was a product of southern
English rural life—a little sumptuous,
but wholesome, and for her daughter’s sake at
least, keeping herself well and safely within the
moral pale in the midst of marked temptations.
She was forty-five, and it said a good deal for her
