s beyond the town, over the river, to
find receptive soil on the Wisconsin side. The seeds germinated, the
clump flourished. It cut the highway and reached down the banks into the
Mississippi, waiting. And while it waited it built up greater bulk for
itself, behind and beside. Each day it pushed a little farther toward
midstream, drowning its own foremost runners so those behind might have
solidity to advance upon.

"Meanwhile from the west the continent imposed upon a continent came
closer. The other day Dubuque went, its weathered bricks and immature
stucco alike obliterated. The Grass ran out like a bather on a cold
morning, hastening to the water before timidity halts him. Although I
was watching I could not tell you at what exact instant the gap was
closed, at what moment the runners from one clump intertwined with those
of the other. But such a moment did occur, and shedding water like a
surfacing whale the united bodies rose from the riverbed to form a
verdant bridge.

"You could not walk across it, at least no man I know would want to try,
but it gives the illusion of permanency no work of man, stone or steel
or concrete, has ever given and it is a dismaying thing to see man's
trade taken over by nature in this fashion.

"The bridge is a dam also. All the debris from the upper reaches
collects against it and soon there will be floods to add to the other
distress the Grass has brought. More than half the country is gone now:
the territories pillaged from Mexico, argued from Britain, bought from
France, have all been lost. Only the original states and Florida remain.
Shall we be more successful in defending our basic land than all the
acquisitions of a century and a half?"

But why add any more? Dry, senile, without feeling, my only wonder was
that his stuff was printed, even in the obscure media where it appeared.

_54._ With twothirds of the country absorbed and a hundred fifty million
people squeezed into what was left, economic conditions became worse
than ever. No European ghetto was as crowded as our cities and no
overpopulated countryside farmed so intensively to so little purpose. An
almost complete cessation of employment except in the remnant of the
export trade, valueless money--English shillings and poundnotes
illegally circulated being the prized medium of exchange--starvation
only irritated rather than relieved by the doles of food seized from the
farmers and grudgingly handed out to the urban