By Land and By Air

stooked. When the last sheave came out of the binder, then there was the threshing, where about seven men helped. At first I used to throw sheaves down to the mill. One had to keep a steady speed, or one would start a bottleneck, or one would hear the miller yelling “sheaves.” The grain had to be taken from the fields and stored in the barn before threshing. It was a great advance when they threshed with actual horsepower; horses kept walking on a treadmill, and kept turning the threshing mill and all the grains and chaff fell on the floor, to be cleaned by farmers that night. In the early days, it took till midnight to clear the grain, but later they attached farmers to the threshing drum, and the clean grain was gathered in half bushel containers, each container marked on a tally board with a stroke — five was 1111. Every two of these were five bushels to count; the miller usually got his work paid in tallies, one bushel in 20 for oats, one in 10 for wheat.

We children planted and picked the potatoes. Usually we started digging the tenth of October, and we usually had extremely cold hands, especially in the morning and late evening - picking sometimes went into November.

When I was about 12 years old, my father thought it would be easier for him to earn money as a carpenter (his trade). He went to Vancouver and wrote a letter home every day. My youngest sister thought her father was a letter. Although we hired a neighbour to do the heavy work on the farm, 1 was left with the lighter farm chores, but was never allowed to miss a day in school.

We often made pocket money by helping the neighbours, planting and picking potatoes. We raised a number of sheep which we marked; with an ”L" on both ears. We let the sheep and lambs go to the woods each spring, and they would wander home when we opened

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