ng up to the landing with deck
and guards black with eager immigrants of all classes.

But Albert Charlton, the student, did not look back any longer. It marks
an epoch in a man's life when he first catches sight of a prairie
landscape, especially if that landscape be one of those great rolling
ones to be seen nowhere so well as in Minnesota. Charlton had crossed
Illinois from Chicago to Dunleith in the night-time, and so had missed
the flat prairies. His sense of sublimity was keen, and, besides his
natural love for such scenes, he had a hobbyist passion for virgin nature
superadded.

"What a magnificent country!" he cried.

"Talkin' sense!" muttered Jim. "Never seed so good a place fer stagin'
in my day."

For every man sees through his own eyes. To the emigrants whose white-top
"prairie schooners" wound slowly along the road, these grass-grown hills
and those far-away meadowy valleys were only so many places where good
farms could be opened without the trouble of cutting off the trees. It
was not landscape, but simply land where one might raise thirty or forty
bushels of spring wheat to the acre, without any danger of "fevernager;"
to the keen-witted speculator looking sharply after corner stakes, at a
little distance from the road, it was just so many quarter sections,
"eighties," and "forties," to be bought low and sold high whenever
opportunity offered; to Jim it was a good country for staging, except a
few "blamed sloughs where the bottom had fell out." But the enthusiastic
eyes of young Albert Charlton despised all sordid and "culinary uses" of
the earth; to him this limitless vista of waving wild grass, these green
meadows and treeless hills dotted everywhere with purple and yellow
flowers, was a sight of Nature in her noblest mood. Such rolling hills
behind hills! If those _rolls_ could be called hills! After an hour the
coach had gradually ascended to the summit of the "divide" between Purple
River on the one side and Big Gun River on the other, and the rows of
willows and cotton-woods that hung over the water's edge--the only trees
under the whole sky--marked distinctly the meandering lines of the two
streams. Albert Charlton shouted and laughed; he stood up beside Jim, and
cried out that it was a paradise.

"Mebbe 'tis," sneered Jim, "Anyway, it's got more'n one devil into it.
_Gil_--lang!"

And under the inspiration of the scenery, Albert, with the impulsiveness
of a young man, unfolded to Whisky Ji