e chapters in the Book of Kings. I
was awed by his intonation of the word "Selah." "_He shall choose our
inheritance for us, the excellency of Jacob whom He loved. Selah._" I had
no idea what the word meant; perhaps he had not. But, as he uttered it, it
became oracular, the most sacred of words.

Early the next morning I ran out of doors to look about me. I had been
told that ours was the only wooden house west of Black Hawk--until you came
to the Norwegian settlement, where there were several. Our neighbors lived
in sod houses and dugouts--comfortable, but not very roomy. Our white frame
house, with a story and half-story above the basement, stood at the east
end of what I might call the farmyard, with the windmill close by the
kitchen door. From the windmill the ground sloped westward, down to the
barns and granaries and pig-yards. This slope was trampled hard and bare,
and washed out in winding gullies by the rain. Beyond the corncribs, at
the bottom of the shallow draw, was a muddy little pond, with rusty willow
bushes growing about it. The road from the post-office came directly by
our door, crossed the farmyard, and curved round this little pond, beyond
which it began to climb the gentle swell of unbroken prairie to the west.
There, along the western sky-line, it skirted a great cornfield, much
larger than any field I had ever seen. This cornfield, and the sorghum
patch behind the barn, were the only broken land in sight. Everywhere, as
far as the eye could reach, there was nothing but rough, shaggy, red
grass, most of it as tall as I.

North of the house, inside the ploughed fire-breaks, grew a thick-set
strip of box-elder trees, low and bushy, their leaves already turning
yellow. This hedge was nearly a quarter of a mile long, but I had to look
very hard to see it at all. The little trees were insignificant against
the grass. It seemed as if the grass were about to run over them, and over
the plum-patch behind the sod chicken-house.

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water
is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the color of
wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And
there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be
running.

I had almost forgotten that I had a grandmother, when she came out, her
sunbonnet on her head, a grain-sack in her hand, and asked me if I did not
want to go to the garden with her to