from long strips of paper attached to an old broom stick she beat the walls and the air and slapped at the screen door.

On the verandah where she had lately churned, she paused a moment to look out absently toward the hay fields, where even from the ranchhouse she could see the great golden piles growing under the skilled hands of her husband and son. In the adjoining field, the earth was black and rich, and spread over an expanse of one hundred smooth level acres, where the new "hand" summer fallowed.

The light of the Alberta day had slowly deepened and the blue skies had imperceptibly darkened. The first shadows of the slowly creeping evening were spreading in faint streaks across the sky. An intense, brooding silence seemed to hold the ending day as in a spell.

On all sides the immense grain lands lay like a wide stretching sea, who's billowing waves merged into the slumbrous sky itself. One seemed to be on the top of a dim gold world. No sound! No stir! Life seemed suspended, ina nimate, and a pervasive loneliness was over all.

Then in the utter stillness of the quiet deepening evening, arose out of the far bog lands, beyond the grain fields, the Kong wild wail of a coyote. It grew from a low moan of haunting appeal into a wild ascending note that floated out across the silent prairie land. Something almost human in its tone, something uncannily mystic and ghostly caused the

farmer's wife, well used to the coyote's cry, to shiver slightly

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