After three months in the woods they are in a hurry to get home and buy yellow boots, stiff hats and cigarettes, and to go and see their girls.

Even in the shanties, as things are now, they are as well fed as in a hotel, with meat and potatoes all winter long.

Now, thirty years ago ..." He broke off for a moment, expressing with a shake of his head those prodigious changes that the years had wrought.
"Thirty years ago, when the railway from Quebec was built, I was there; that was something like hardship, I can tell you! I was only sixteen years of age but I chopped with the rest of them to clear the right of way, always twenty-five miles ahead of the steel, and for fourteen months I never clapped eye on a house.

We had no tents, summer or winter, only shelters of boughs that we made for ourselves.
And from morning till night it was chop, chop, chop,--eaten by the flies, and in the course of the same day soaked with rain and roasted by the sun." "Every Monday morning they opened a sack of flour and we made ourselves a bucketful of pancakes, and all the rest of the week, three times a day, one dug into that pail for something to eat.

By Wednesday, no longer any pancakes, because they were all stuck together; nothing there but a mass of dough.