Mother Chapdelaine ended with a sigh. Her thoughts were ever fondly
revisiting the older parishes where the land has long been cleared
and cultivated, and where the houses are neighbourly-her lost
paradise.

Her husband clenched his fists and shook his head with an obstinate
gesture. "Only you wait a few months ... When the boys are back
from the woods we shall set to work, they two, Tit'Be, and I, and
presently we shall have our land cleared. With four good men ax in
hand and not afraid of work things will go quickly, even in the hard
timber. Two years from now there will be grain harvested, and
pasturage that will support a good herd of cattle. I tell you that
we are going to make land."

"Make land!" Rude phrase of the country, summing up in two words all
the heartbreaking labour that transforms the incult woods, barren of
sustenance, to smiling fields, ploughed and sown. Samuel
Chapdelaine's eyes flamed with enthusiasm and determination as he
spoke.

For this was the passion of his life; the passion of a man whose
soul was in the clearing, not the tilling of the earth. Five times
since boyhood had he taken up wild land, built a house, a stable and
a barn, wrested from the unbroken forest a comfortable farm; and
five times he had sold out to begin it all again farther north,
suddenly losing interest; energy and ambition vanishing once the
first rough work was done, when neighbours appeared and the
countryside began to be opened up and inhabited. Some there were who
entered into his feelings; others praised the courage but thought