od-bye, I hope you'll
succeed. I'm sure you will."

She extended her hand and I, recalling the instructions of my most
romantic fiction, raised it to my lips. "Good-bye!" I huskily said, and
turned away.

My next night was spent in Faribault. Here I touched storied ground, for
near this town Edward Eggleston had laid the scene of his novel, _The
Mystery of Metropolisville_ and my imagination responded to the magic
which lay in the influence of the man of letters. I wrote to Alice a
long and impassioned account of my sensations as I stood beside the
Cannonball River.

My search for a school proving futile, I pushed on to the town of
Farmington, where the Dakota branch of the Milwaukee railroad crossed my
line of march. Here I felt to its full the compelling power of the swift
stream of immigration surging to the west. The little village had
doubled in size almost in a day. It was a junction point, a place of
transfer, and its thin-walled unpainted pine hotels were packed with
men, women and children laden with bags and bundles (all bound for the
west) and the joyous excitement of these adventurers compelled me to
change my plan. I decided to try some of the newer counties in western
Minnesota. Romance was still in the West for me.

I slept that night on the floor in company with four or five young Iowa
farmers, and the smell of clean white shavings, the wailing of tired
children, the excited muttering of fathers, the plaintive voices of
mothers, came through the partitions at intervals, producing in my mind
an effect which will never pass away. It seemed to me at the moment as
if all America were in process of change, all hurrying to overtake the
vanishing line of the middle border, and the women at least were
secretly or openly doubtful of the outcome. Woman is not by nature an
explorer. She is the home-lover.

Early the next morning I bought a ticket for Aberdeen, and entered the
train crammed with movers who had found the "prairie schooner" all too
slow. The epoch of the canvas-covered wagon had passed. The era of the
locomotive, the day of the chartered car, had arrived. Free land was
receding at railroad speed, the borderline could be overtaken only by
steam, and every man was in haste to arrive.

All that day we rumbled and rattled into a strange country, feeding our
little engine with logs of wood, which we stopped occasionally to secure
from long ricks which lined the banks of the river. At Chaska, at
Gra