‘Come north and look!’ cried the Afrites of the Railway.  ’You’re only on the fringe of it here.’  I preferred to keep the old road, and to gape at miracles accomplished since my day.  The old, false-fronted, hollow-stomached Western hotels were gone; their places filled by five-storey brick or stone ones, with Post Offices to match.  Occasionally some overlooked fragment of the past still cleaved to a town, and marked it for an old acquaintance, but often one had to get a mile away and look back on a place—­as one holds a palimpsest up against the light—­to identify the long overlaid lines of the beginnings.  Each town supplied the big farming country behind it, and each town school carried the Union Jack on a flagstaff in its playground.  So far as one could understand, the scholars are taught neither to hate, nor despise, nor beg from, their own country.

I whispered to a man that I was a little tired of a three days’ tyranny of Wheat, besides being shocked at farmers who used clean bright straw for fuel, and made bonfires of their chaff-hills.  ’You’re ’way behind the times,’ said he.  ’There’s fruit and dairying and any quantity of mixed farming going forward all around—­let alone irrigation further West.  Wheat’s not our only king by a long sight.  Wait till you strike such and such a place.’  It was there I met a prophet and a preacher in the shape of a Commissioner of the Local Board of Trade (all towns have them), who firmly showed me the vegetables which his district produced.  They were vegetables too—­all neatly staged in a little kiosk near the station.

I think the pious Thomas Tusser would have loved that man.  ‘Providence,’ said he, shedding pamphlets at every gesture, ’did not intend everlasting Wheat in this section.  No, sir!  Our business is to keep ahead of Providence—­to meet her with mixed farming.  Are you interested in mixed farming?  Psha!  Too bad you missed our fruit and vegetable show.  It draws people together, mixed farming does.  I don’t say Wheat is narrowing to the outlook, but I claim there’s more sociability and money in mixed farming.  We’ve been hypnotised by Wheat and Cattle.  Now—­the cars won’t start yet awhile—­I’ll just tell you my ideas.’

For fifteen glorious minutes he gave me condensed essence of mixed farming, with excursions into sugar-beet (did you know they are making sugar in Alberta?), and he talked of farmyard muck, our dark mother of all things, with proper devotion.

‘What we want now,’ he cried in farewell, ’is men—­more men.  Yes, and women.’

They need women sorely for domestic help, to meet the mad rush of work at harvest time—­maids who will help in house, dairy, and chicken-run till they are married.

A steady tide sets that way already; one contented settler recruiting others from England; but if a tenth of that energy wasted on ’social reform’ could be diverted to decently thought out and supervised emigration work (’Labour’ does not yet object to people working on the land) we might do something worth talking about.  The races which work and do not form Committees are going into the country at least as fast as ours.  It makes one jealous and afraid to watch aliens taking, and taking honestly, so much of this treasure of good fortune and sane living.