If bare, it did not seem starved.

It was naked and unshaven; it was stripped like a boxer for the rubbing-down after the fight.

Not so refined and suggestive and luxurious as when it was clothed with the coat of ripe corn in the ear, it still showed the fibre of its being to no disadvantage.

And overhead the joy of the prairie grew apace.
September saw the vast prairie spaces around Askatoon shorn and shrivelled of its glory of ripened grain, but with a new life come into the air-sweet, stinging, vibrant life, which had the suggestion of nature recreating her vitality, inflaming herself with Edenic strength, a battery charging itself, to charge the world in turn with force and energy.

Morning gave pure elation, as though all created being must strive; noon was the pulse of existence at the top of its activity; evening was glamorous; and all the lower sky was spread with those colours which Titian stole from the joyous horizon that filled his eyes.