Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba — 17 - Letter 17

June 26. We quite feel as if we had been here years instead of about five weeks; and though it was prophesied before we left England that, after turning the house up-side down and making the men very uncomfortable with our cleanings, we should then go on strike, it has not been altogether fulfilled.

We certainly did try to clean up a bit, but we still help in housework, and have to do as the servants at home.

If we expect visitors, or on a Sunday, put on a tidy gown; otherwise we generally live in the oldest of frocks (which are more or less stained with either mud or the red paint with which we have been painting the roofs of both the stable and the labourers' house), very big aprons, sleeves to match, and our sun-bonnets.

E---- has concocted for herself a thin blue-and-white shirt, and as she generally lives with her sleeves tucked up, her arms are getting quite brown and sunburnt.

Our boots are the only things we do not much like cleaning, they get so soon dirty again;

and we have come to the happy conclusion that unblacked boots have a "cachet" that blacked boots have not.

When we first arrived the men promised to do them for us every Sunday; which promises, like so many, have partaken of the nature of pie-crusts.

We are both of us delighted to have come, the whole experience is so new, and what we couldn't have realised in England; and I am sure, in spite of the _bouleversement_ of the bachelor _regime_, it is a great pleasure to the men we are here.

Our Winnipeg acquaintances tell us that A---- is quite a changed man, so cheery and even bumptious, and that everything is now "What we do at the farm."

It is all very well, however, in the summer; if obliged to stay through the winter, it would be quite another "pair of shoes."

The thermometer often registers forty degrees of frost, though the effects of this extreme temperature in the dry exhilarating atmosphere is not so unpleasant as might be imagined, but the loneliness and dreariness of the prairie with two or three feet of snow would be appalling.

The cold is so great that you have to put on a buffalo coat, cap, and gloves, before you can touch the stove to light the fire, and notwithstanding the coal stove which is always kept going in the hall to warm the up-stairs room (through which the pipe is carried), the water in buckets standing alongside gets frozen.

Then the blizzards, which are storms of sleet and snow driven with a fierce wind, and so thick that it is quite impossible to get out of doors, or see at all, would be too trying.

Even to get across the yard to the further stable the men have to have a rope stretched as guide so as not to lose their way; and these storms sometimes, as they did this last year, continue for three weeks consecutively.

The snow on the prairie is never very deep, but it drifts a good deal, and was to the depth of twelve feet on the west side of the house.

No work can be done much in the winter on account of the cold and snow, so that from the middle of April, when the snow begins to go, until the beginning of October everything has to be rushed through and as many hands put on as they can possibly get, who are all discharged at the end of the summer and only two or three kept to look after the animals.

After threshing, these men have little or nothing to do: digging out the well to water the horses, teaming hay into the town on sleighs, and fetching timber over from the other farm, is about their only outdoor occupation.

All the animals in the shape of horses, cows, pigs and chickens are huddled together in the stables for warmth.