ted to that inspiring vista. For the
first time in my life I longed to put this noble stream into verse.

All that day I had studied the land, musing upon its distinctive
qualities, and while I acknowledged the natural beauty of it, I revolted
from the gracelessness of its human habitations. The lonely boxlike
farm-houses on the ridges suddenly appeared to me like the dens of wild
animals. The lack of color, of charm in the lives of the people
anguished me. I wondered why I had never before perceived the futility
of woman's life on a farm.

I asked myself, "Why have these stern facts never been put into our
literature as they have been used in Russia and in England? Why has this
land no story-tellers like those who have made Massachusetts and New
Hampshire illustrious?"

These and many other speculations buzzed in my brain. Each moment was a
revelation of new uglinesses as well as of remembered beauties.

At four o'clock of a wet morning I arrived at Charles City, from which
I was to take "the spur" for Osage. Stiffened and depressed by my
night's ride, I stepped out upon the platform and watched the train as
it passed on, leaving me, with two or three other silent and sleepy
passengers, to wait until seven o'clock in the morning for the
"accommodation train." I was still busy with my problem, but the salient
angles of my interpretation were economic rather than literary.

Walking to and fro upon the platform, I continued to ponder my
situation. In a few hours I would be among my old friends and
companions, to measure and be measured. Six years before I had left them
to seek my fortune in the eastern world. I had promised
little,--fortunately--and I was returning, without the pot of gold and
with only a tinge of glory.

Exteriorly I had nothing but a crop of sturdy whiskers to show for my
years of exile but mentally I was much enriched. Twenty years of
development lay between my thought at the moment and those of my simpler
days. My study of Spencer, Whitman and other of the great leaders of the
world, my years of absorbed reading in the library, my days of
loneliness and hunger in the city had swept me into a far bleak land of
philosophic doubt where even the most daring of my classmates would
hesitate to follow me.

A violent perception of the mysterious, the irrevocable march of human
life swept over me and I shivered before a sudden realization of the
ceaseless change and shift of western life and landscape.