Then we worked at the harvest, stooking and threshing.1 We got pretty good pay. Six dollars a day for threshing. I think it was five dollars for stooking. And that was pretty good money then. I saved enough to buy a coat, and maybe a pair of shoes; I don't remember. Threshing: they'd get us awake at four o'clock in the morning, and we'd be out in the field by six with the team hauling to the machine. We'd thresh till about seven at night. We'd have lunch in the field at noon, and then we'd have supper after we come in in the evening; around seven. I was there for quite a spell that fall and early winter, and then I went to work on the CN. In 1926, we went up on the Road to Churchill and we were up there a year. We slept in bunkhouses on the track — but there was some of them in tents - and it averaged around 40 below zero [Fahrenheit] all winter. One day it was 60 below. But nobody could work that day; it was too cold. Oh, [the people in the tents] were better off than we were up on the track, 'cause they were down in the valley and it was boarded up with snow. It was very good. I had the measles there in the camp. An outside toilet. Not even a roof on it; just a pole across - you sit on the pole. You'd have to take your mitt and brush the snow off. That was roughing it! And I got sick with the measles. There was another fella in the camp had the measles and I took them and I was in camp for three or four days. A fella from Prince Edward Island , from Kensington , Condon; he stayed in to watch me for a couple of days. I guess I had a fever and I wouldn't stay in bed, I suppose, and he had to stay in with me and look after me. And then, one of the old foremen, old Nelson, he came in and he saw that the measles wasn't coming out on me. And he went home to his bunkhouse and came in with a big drink of rum and made it hot on the stove with hot water and made me drink it. The next morning the measles was out on me and I got all right and went out to work again. Well, Billy Morgan, he was a Welshman; he was a blacksmith on the outfit. And he had a blanket - you know, one of those long ones, double blankets, they were so long. And he'd never make his bed. "Stooking" grain or wheat wasn't heavy work, but it was hard on the back. The sheaves made by the binder had to be stood on end to dry. A "stook" on P.E.I , always had 12 sheaves. In , there wasn't a strict code governing the number of sheaves in a stook. For a more complete description of stooking, see Baxter Ross, page 232. ___________ ^ BELFAST PEOPLE