on it I
relive many delightful excursions into the northern woods. It appears
that Harriet and I were in continual harvest of nuts and berries. Our
walks to school were explorations and we spent nearly every Saturday and
Sunday in minute study of the country-side, devouring everything which
was remotely edible. We gorged upon May-apples until we were ill, and
munched black cherries until we were dizzy with their fumes. We
clambered high trees to collect baskets of wild grapes which our mother
could not use, and we garnered nuts with the insatiable greed of
squirrels. We ate oak-shoots, fern-roots, leaves, bark,
seed-balls,--everything!--not because we were hungry but because we
loved to experiment, and we came home, only when hungry or worn out or
in awe of the darkness.

It was a delightful season, full of the most satisfying companionship
and yet of the names of my playmates I can seize upon only two--the
others have faded from the tablets of my memory. I remember Ned who
permitted me to hold his plow, and Perry who taught me how to tame the
half-wild colts that filled his father's pasture. Together we spent long
days lassoing--or rather snaring--the feet of these horses and subduing
them to the halter. We had many fierce struggles but came out of them
all without a serious injury.

Late in August my father again loaded our household goods into wagons,
and with our small herd of cattle following, set out toward the west,
bound once again to overtake the actual line of the middle border.

This journey has an unforgettable epic charm as I look back upon it.
Each mile took us farther and farther into the unsettled prairie until
in the afternoon of the second day, we came to a meadow so wide that
its western rim touched the sky without revealing a sign of man's
habitation other than the road in which we travelled.

The plain was covered with grass tall as ripe wheat and when my father
stopped his team and came back to us and said, "Well, children, here we
are on The Big Prairie," we looked about us with awe, so endless seemed
this spread of wild oats and waving blue-joint.

Far away dim clumps of trees showed, but no chimney was in sight, and no
living thing moved save our own cattle and the hawks lazily wheeling in
the air. My heart filled with awe as well as wonder. The majesty of this
primeval world exalted me. I felt for the first time the poetry of the
unplowed spaces. It seemed that the "herds of deer and buffa