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There was a pang at going, for Penny's Pit, like most experiences, however hard, had its joys. I was working as a navvy there, and the hours of shoveling were ten per day. It was all as long ago as that, though even then the eight-hour day shout was heard at election times. Yes, there was a pang at leaving Penny's Pit. It was the closing of a door. It was passing on. It was the ending of a period that had not been by any means without its pleasures.

There was hard work, but there was refreshing sleep. The reflected sunlight from the gravel of the pit in which we toiled blistered the under parts of our chins, making shoveling a torture; so we wore scarves bunched up around the neck, and these scarves made us hotter. There were mosquitoes too. But the evenings were cool, up on the plateau of that Dry Belt. And there was a something about life there.

Often nowadays when I mention a liking for the beauty of the West some man will chip in with the comment that if I had to work in it I'd soon forget the beauty, taking me for a sort of fair-weather friend of nature. But when I was working in it in the sense meant (not sitting in a pleasant bungalow writing, which doesn't seem like work to some people, but outside with heavy tools) I never lost sight of its beauty. That was the attraction. The dust and heat of the day, the callouses on the hands, or the splinters in them, were merely by the way. At Penny's Pit the air and the scene more than atoned. Above the rasp of the shovels with which we worked astern of the big, rhythmically-coughing steam-shovel, I would hear the murmur of Thompson River lapsing past; and that murmur, somehow, was worth much weary labor to hear. But I do not try to explain these things to those who say: "If you had to work in it you'd soon get fed up with the beauty." The attempt would only lead to argument with the unconvinceable.