, and though my ticket and my meals along the route had used
up my last dollar, I felt amply repaid as I trod this new earth and
confronted this new sky--for both earth and sky were to my perception
subtly different from those of Iowa and Minnesota.

The endless stretches of short, dry grass, the gorgeous colors of the
dawn, the marvellous, shifting, phantom lakes and headlands, the violet
sunset afterglow,--all were widely different from our old home, and the
far, bare hills were delightfully suggestive of the horseman, the Indian
and the buffalo. The village itself was hardly more than a summer camp,
and yet its hearty, boastful citizens talked almost deliriously of
"corner lots" and "boulevards," and their chantings were timed to the
sound of hammers. The spirit of the builder seized me and so with my
return ticket in my pocket, I joined the carpenters at work on my
father's claim some two miles from the village with intent to earn money
for further exploration.

Grandfather Garland had also taken a claim (although he heartily
disliked the country) and in order to provide for both families a double
house was being built across the line between the two farms. I helped
shingle the roof, and being twenty-one now, and my own master, I
accepted wages from my father without a qualm. I earned every cent of my
two dollars per day, I assure you, but I carefully omitted all reference
to shingling, in my letters to my classmates.

At the end of a fortnight with my pay in my pocket I started eastward on
a trip which I fully intended to make very long and profoundly
educational. That I was green, very green, I knew but all that could be
changed by travel.

At the end of my second day's journey, I reached Hastings, a small town
on the Mississippi river, and from there decided to go by water to
Redwing some thirty miles below. All my life I had longed to ride on a
Mississippi steamboat, and now, as I waited on the wharf at the very
instant of the fulfillment of my desire, I expanded with anticipatory
satisfaction.

The arrival of the _War Eagle_ from St. Paul carried a fine foreign
significance, and I ascended its gang-plank with the air of a traveller
embarking at Cairo for Assouan. Once aboard the vessel I mingled,
aloofly, with the passengers, absorbed in study of the river winding
down among its wooded hills.

This ecstasy lasted during the entire trip--indeed it almost took on
poetic form as the vessel approached the la