dig potatoes for dinner. The garden,
curiously enough, was a quarter of a mile from the house, and the way to
it led up a shallow draw past the cattle corral. Grandmother called my
attention to a stout hickory cane, tipped with copper, which hung by a
leather thong from her belt. This, she said, was her rattlesnake cane. I
must never go to the garden without a heavy stick or a corn-knife; she had
killed a good many rattlers on her way back and forth. A little girl who
lived on the Black Hawk road was bitten on the ankle and had been sick all
summer.

I can remember exactly how the country looked to me as I walked beside my
grandmother along the faint wagon-tracks on that early September morning.
Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still with me, for more than
anything else I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing
morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort
of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping,
galloping {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}

Alone, I should never have found the garden--except, perhaps, for the big
yellow pumpkins that lay about unprotected by their withering vines--and I
felt very little interest in it when I got there. I wanted to walk
straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which
could not be very far away. The light air about me told me that the world
ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a
little farther there would be only sun and sky, and one would float off
into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow
shadows on the grass. While grandmother took the pitchfork we found
standing in one of the rows and dug potatoes, while I picked them up out
of the soft brown earth and put them into the bag, I kept looking up at
the hawks that were doing what I might so easily do.

When grandmother was ready to go, I said I would like to stay up there in
the garden awhile.

She peered down at me from under her sunbonnet. "Are n't you afraid of
snakes?"

"A little," I admitted, "but I'd like to stay anyhow."

"Well, if you see one, don't have anything to do with him. The big yellow
and brown ones won't hurt you; they're bull-snakes and help to keep the
gophers down. Don't be scared if you see anything look out of that hole in
the bank over there. That's a badger hole. He's about as big as a big
'possum, and his face is striped, black and white. He tak