ment was, "Say, have you got a bit more capital? That's what we really want."
That sour milk became a veritable nightmare that never left me. I had enough of milk. Yet, later in life, I found myself "in milk" again, but that time it was dried milk, a profitable business to the owners, though it brought me nothing. I worked six years at it for a bare living wage. But, at any rate, it couldn't turn sour. It was a powder.
Alfred Cooper was a delightful fellow. I think some detail of how our partnership came to be may bear the telling. It points a moral if it does not adorn a tale. It may, again, prove useful to other young Englishmen in Canada similarly waiting with money to invest; but on the other hand it may not, since there can be few, I imagine, as green as I was then, owing to a strange upbringing, or as ignorant of even the simplest worldly practices. Of the evangelical training responsible for this criminal ignorance I will speak later.
Cooper, then, was a delightful fellow, fitting my ideal of a type I had read about--the fearless, iron-muscled colonial white man who fought Indians. The way we met was quite simply calculated--by a clerk in the bank where my English allowance of £100 a year was paid by my father. The clerk and I made friends--naturally; and one day--also naturally--he suggested a Sunday walk to Islington, some six miles down the lake shore. We could get tea at a farm he knew. We did. The praises of the Cooper family, who owned it, had already been sung. I was enchanted. So, doubtless, was the clerk.
The farm was a small one--perhaps eight acres; and Cooper lived on it in poverty with his aged mother and unmarried sister. It was charmingly situated, the fields running down to the water, pine copses dotting the meadows to the north, and the little village church standing at one corner near the road. Mrs. Cooper, in cap and apron, dropping every "h" that came her way, described to me how she and her husband had emigrated from
England sixty years before, in the days of sailing ships.
