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“If it were to clear up I wouldn’t know how to behave, it would seem so unnatural,” said Kate. “Do you, by any chance, remember what the sun looks like, Phil?”

“Does the sun ever shine in Saskatchewan anyhow?” I asked with assumed sarcasm, just to make Kate’s big, bonny black eyes flash.

They did flash; but Kate laughed immediately after, as she sat down on a chair in front of me and cradled her long, thin, spirited dark face in her palms.

“We have more sunny weather in Saskatchewan than in all the rest of Canada put together, in an average year,” she said, clicking her strong, white teeth and snapping her eyes at me. “But I can’t blame you for feeling sceptical about it, Phil. If I went to a new country and it rained every day–all day–all night–after I got there for three whole weeks I’d think things not lawful to be uttered about the climate too. So, little cousin, I forgive you. Remember that ‘into each life some rain must fall, some days must be dark and dreary.’ Oh, if you’d only come to visit me last fall. We had such a bee-yew-tiful September last year. We were drowned in sunshine. This fall we’re drowned in water. Old settlers tell of a similar visitation in ’72, though they claim even that wasn’t quite as bad as this.”

I was sitting rather disconsolately by an upper window of Uncle Kenneth Morrison’s log house at Arrow Creek. Below was what in dry weather–so, at least, I was told–was merely a pretty, grassy little valley, but which was now a considerable creek of muddy yellow water, rising daily. Beyond was a cheerless prospect of sodden prairie and dripping “bluff.”

“It would be a golden, mellow land, with purple hazes over the bluffs, in a normal fall,” assured Kate. “Even now if the sun were just to shine out for a day and a good ‘chinook’ blow you’d see a surprising change. I feel like chanting continually that old rhyme I learned in the first primer,

‘Rain, rain, go away,
Come again some other day:
–some other day next summer–
Phil and Katie want to play.’

Philippa, dear girl, don’t look so dismal. It’s bound to clear up sometime.”

“I wish the ‘sometime’ would come soon, then,” I said, rather grumpily.

“You know it hasn’t really rained for three days,” protested Kate. “It’s been damp and horrid and threatening, but it hasn’t rained. I defy you to say that it has actually rained.”

“When it’s so wet underfoot that you can’t stir out without rubber boots it might as well be wet overhead too,” I said, still grumpily.

“I believe you’re homesick, girl,” said Kate anxiously.

“No, I’m not,” I answered, laughing, and feeling ashamed of my ungraciousness. “Nobody could be homesick with such a jolly good fellow as you around, Kate. It’s only that this weather is getting on my nerves a bit. I’m fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. If your chinook doesn’t come soon, Kitty, I’ll do something quite desperate.”

“I feel that way myself,” admitted Kate. “Real reckless, Phil. Anyhow, let’s put on our despised rubber boots and sally out for a wade.”

“Here’s Jim Nash coming on horseback down the trail,” I said. “Let’s wait and see if he’s got the mail.”

We hurried down, Kate humming, “Somewhere the sun is shining,” solely, I believe, because she knew it aggravated me. At any other time I should probably have thrown a pillow at her, but just now I was too eager to see if Jim Nash had brought any mail.

I had come from Ontario, the first of September, to visit Uncle Kenneth Morrison’s family. I had been looking forward to the trip for several years. My cousin Kate and I had always corresponded since they had “gone west” ten years before; and Kate, who revelled in the western life, had sung the praises of her adopted land rapturously and constantly. It was quite a joke on her that, when I did finally come to visit her, I should have struck the wettest autumn ever recorded in the history of the west. A wet September in Saskatchewan is no joke, however. The country was almost “flooded out.” The trails soon became nearly impassable. All our plans for drives and picnics and inter-neighbour visiting–at that time a neighbour meant a man who lived at least six miles away–had to be given up. Yet I was not lonesome, and I enjoyed my visit in spite of everything. Kate was a host in herself. She was twenty-eight years old–eight years my senior–but the difference in our ages had never been any barrier to our friendship. She was a jolly, companionable, philosophical soul, with a jest for every situation, and a merry solution for every perplexity. The only fault I had to find with her was her tendency to make parodies. Kate’s parodies were perfectly awful and always got on my nerves.