Part of journal kept by Lady Angella Loring: I hate men and despise women. I am afraid of children. Animals are my only friends.

I'm not pretty. My face is hard, my hair—what is left of it—of no color. My hands are calloused. I am a "tough old nut" as once I heard a "hand" of the Bar Q describe me. I wear men's clothes because they are comfortable and because I want to forget that I am a woman.

My father was the victim of a swindler, a smiling-faced, lying-tongued scoundrel, who robbed him of all we possessed in the world. The man I was to have married was as surely my father's murderer as if he had held the hand that sent the shot through my father's brain that killed him. I am the last of the Lorings, I—the poor old man-maid recluse, on the edge of Yankee Valley in the Canadian Northwest.

This bit of Alberta land is all that is left of the once vast Loring estate. That I still have this is due purely to the accident of a groom paying back a debt he owed my father. It was strange that I should have learned of its existence at a time when I believed that the end had come for me even as it had come for my father. True, I was not to go out of life by the act of my own hand and will. A quite eminent scientist had pronounced my death sentence. He gave me a few months in which to live. It was a ghastly situation for one who had been through what I had and who desired to live for the noble purpose of revenge. That sounds melodramatic and I suppose if I were pious I would hear in mind that revenge is sweet only for God. But my nature is not sweet and hell raged within me at that time. It was strange, as I have said, at that time suddenly to learn of the existence of this ranch. I seemed to see it as in a dream—it lay far off under a spotlight of Alberta sunlight and it called to me with a clarion call.

I came out here. I am hard and strong. I don't intend to die. I've something to live for. Not a man. I hate men, as I have said above. I have deep-rooted, never-dying aversion for the whole mean race of men. That which I have to live for is this quarter section of Alberta land. It's mine. I love it better than anything else on earth.

I broke my own land. I've put in my own crop. I hayed and chored, fenced and drudged, both in house and upon the land. I made most of my own furniture and I practically rebuilt the inside of this old shack.

"Necessity is the mother of invention" goes the proverb, but I loathe proverbs. One can find an opposing one for even the best of them. Some people pin proverbs and poems and texts upon their souls as on their walls. I suppose they get the sort of comfort and help from it that a cripple gets from a crutch. As far as that goes we are all cripples in life, and few there be who can walk without a crutch. I never saw a human being yet who did not limp, at least mentally....

There's one man in Alberta who comes to see me regularly once a month and no snub or plain telling that I prefer my own company to that of any others makes any impression upon him. He is painfully, hopelessly Scotch. However, one cannot quarrel with a man who has saved one's life. I am, or was, what they call in the west a "lunger." I was definitely diagnosed as "T.B." But if any one doubts that my lungs are sound now they should hear me let out a war whoop that would compare well with old Chief Pie Belly's. Pie Belly is a Stony Indian and I have learned some things of that Indian. Not that I make a daily practice of war whooping, but there's sport in letting the full volume and force of one's lungs pour out across the utter silence of the prairie. If my voice carries to my neighbors—the nearest is five miles off—no doubt they take me for a coyote.

That Scotch doctor likes to pick a quarrel, to argue, to find fault and to bark like a dog. Alberta, according to him, is a "mon's land." There is no sentimental reference to "God's country" or "Sunny Alberta" from him. It is a hard land—a mon's land. I've no right here. I should not work outside the house. I should engage a couple to work the place on shares. I should dress as a "lass"; I should permit my hair to grow "as God planted it"; I should chasten my bitter tongue and heart; I should cultivate my neighbors, and I should not set myself up against my fellow men. Hm! Sounds very fine, my Scotch friend, but what do you know of what I have been through? How can you know that I am frozen inside?

My ranch—and I would rather write of my ranch than dig into my personal thoughts and emotions—if there are any left in me—my ranch lies midway between the good grain lands on one side and the hill country, the cattle lands, on the other. I suppose I am part of Yankee Valley. I am sorry for that because I do not like Americans. They are noisy, insincere, and a boasting, bragging lot. As far as that goes, I like the English less. The Scotch are hard to tolerate, and as for the Irish, the devil made them in his own likeness. If it comes down to that, I don't know a single nationality that I can respect, and I have lived all over the world.

To farm is to gamble on the largest scale possible, for the earth may be said to be our board, the seed our dice and the elements, the soil, the parasites, the hail, the frost and the drought, these are the cards stacked against us. But, like all gamblers, we are reaching out for a prize that enthralls and lures us, and that "pot of gold at the end of our rainbow" is the harvest—the wonderful, glorious golden harvest of Alberta. Some day, it will come to me also.

In the spring, our land is excessively fragrant. The black, loamy soil fairly calls to one to lay the seed within its fertile bosom. Anything will grow in Alberta. It's a thrilling sight to see the grain prick up sturdy and strong. When first my own showed its green head above the earth, I suffered such exhilaration that I could have thrown myself upon the ground, and kissed the good earth. Those tiny points of green, there on the soil that I myself had plowed, disked, harrowed and seeded. I suffered the exquisite pang of the creator.

If only one might shut up memories in a box, close the lid tight and turn the key upon them. If but the past could be blotted out, as are our sins by death, then, methinks, we would find comfort and compensation in this poor life once again.

The last generation of the Lorings were a soft-handed, dependent race. I come of an older, primitive breed, I am a reversion to type, for I love to labor with my hands. Had I been a man, I might have been a ditch or a grave digger. I love the earth. When I die, I do not want to be cremated. I want to go back to the soil.

I talk here of compensations and of my ranch which I say is what I have to live for, yet life has not been sweet or easy for me in Alberta. It's been a battle with a grim antagonist—for poverty and sickness and cold—what can be grimmer than these? And then, much as I love to put in my crop, I have not yet had the joy of reaping it, for cutworm took my first, and this year early frost destroyed my grain when it had attained almost full growth. But never mind—that is all part of the game. The hardest part has been the enforced work at the Bar Q. No one enjoys laboring for those beneath them. I don't mean the laboring men. I have no sense of caste whatsoever, and they are as good as I am, I suppose. But Bull Langdon, the man whose pay I must take. He is a wild beast, one of the two legged cattle that should go to the shambles with his stock.

Yet I am not afraid of Bull Langdon. He never shouts at me. He only blusters, and his bloodshot eyes fall before mine. He may be the great boss and bully of the Bar Q. With his big bull whip in hand, his cattle may cower before him, and his men quail and slink away; his wife and Jake may tremble at the sound of his voice or step. I have his "number." I know that he is a coward, a great sneaking bully. He can lord it over small men and women and half-witted Indian boys. He never employs stronger or bigger men than himself. A giant in stature, and a Samson in strength, nevertheless I assert he is a coward, a big unwhipped bully, whose own strength will some day prove his boomerang.

It's queer, as I have run along, I have omitted all mention of one in Alberta whom I should call a friend. Just a poor, illiterate young girl. I never can forget Nettie Day as I first saw her. Sickness, delirium even, may cast a glamour over things. It may be then our imagination pictures things as they are not; but nevertheless, Nettie's face, bending above my own, with its gentle look of tenderness and compassion, seemed to me as sweet as the "blessed damozel's" as she looked down from heaven to the earth beneath. She had wide, deep blue eyes, a child's eyes, full of an unplumbed innocence and questioning. Strange how one can come into our lives for such a little spell, disappear beyond our sight, and still remain in our hearts. I have seen little enough of Nettie, and the last time I saw her I hate to recall that I scolded her.

Next to my place is a quarter section of homestead land, owned by a young man named Stanley. One day I was fencing, when this young fellow, who had made attempts upon several occasions to speak to me, came over and watched me at my work. I ignored him, but like my doctor friend, above mentioned, he is Scotch and thick. He didn't even know he was being ignored, and presently in a disgustingly friendly way he had the colossal nerve to attempt to instruct me in the art of making post holes. At that juncture I turned around and looked at him. Now I may seem as that Bar Q hand said, like a "tough old nut." No doubt I look like one, but I know the English trick of freezing ordinary people by a mere look. It is a trick, like the Englishman's monocle and the strange part is only an English person can do it. You just stare, stonily, at the insignificant atom before you. I begin at the feet, and travel contemptuously up the whole despised body, till I reach the abashed and propitiating face. One need not say a single word. That look—if you know the technique of the act—is enough. This young Stanley dropped his hammer in a hurry and turned very red.

"I say, you're not mad at me, are you?" he stammered.

And just then Nettie, whom the doctor had dropped at my house that day, came from out the house, and something about that boy's face, just a flicker of the eye and the deepening red about his ears apprised me of the reason why he was so keen on being friends with me. I turned just in time to see on Nettie's guilty face the identical flicker I had noted on Stanley's. As cross as two sticks, I grabbed that girl by the arm and shoved her along the field to the house.

Once inside, I made her sit down, while I told her in detail all of the miseries and pitfalls and deceits and heartbreaks, the general unhappiness that befalls one foolish enough to fall in love. Love I told her was an antiquated emotion which had been burned out by the force of its own mad fire. I said something like that, for I was talking with feeling, upon a topic I understood, and as I talked, becoming more and more moved and excited as my subject warmed me, suddenly I observed that Nettie's eyes were fixed on space, as if on something very far away. She had her large, white hands unconsciously clasped upon her bosom; she was kneeling beside me, and something about her pose struck me at that moment as so divinely beautiful, so exquisitely madonna-like and lovely, that I choked upon my words and could go no further.

Then Nettie came out of her dream—I am sure she had heard not a word of my discourse—and said:

"Thank you, Angel." That girl calls me—Angel. God alone knows why. There is little of the angel in me.

I have not seen her since that day. Life has played strange tricks upon my little friend since then. Her father dead, her brothers and sisters scattered about in institutions and on farms, Nettie herself—at the Bar Q—of all places in the world, the last I would have wished to have seen her go!

Sometimes in the evening, when my work is done, I can recall to my mind Nettie as I last saw her with almost photographic clearness, and I experience a sense of nearness to her. The other night I had an impulse to start out then and there for the Bar Q. I felt that she needed me.

That young man on the adjoining quarter section sings a great deal as he works. I can hear him clear across the field—he has a real voice, a full, fine baritone, and in the still evenings, I confess there is something uplifting about that fresh young voice as it rings across the prairie. His home is nearing completion, he says, and that is why he sings. The thought of home and Nettie warms his heart till it bursts into song. Ah—well, who am I to judge what is best for these young people? So, sing on, young Cyril. I hope that that clear brave voice of yours, as full of melody as a lark's, will never falter.

Last night, when I came in from the field, the half-breed Jake sidled along from behind my house. It gave me a start to see the poor idiot with his wild, witless face. He wanted to tell me something about the Bar Q. He jabbered and gibbered, and I could hardly make head or tail of what he was saying, save that Bull Langdon was eating something up.