was embraced by the black soil with its lovely fell of
greenery. Up to that fateful moment, the prairie of the farm and of the
township had been virgin sod; but now it bowed its neck to the yoke of
wedlock. Nothing like it takes place any more; for the sod of the
meadows and pastures is quite a different thing from the untouched skin
of the original earth. Breaking prairie was the most beautiful, the most
epochal, and most hopeful, and as I look back at it, in one way the most
pathetic thing man ever did, for in it, one of the loveliest things ever
created began to come to its predestined end.

The plow itself was long, low, and yacht-like in form; a curved blade of
polished steel. The plowman walked behind it in a clean new path,
sheared as smooth as a concrete pavement, with not a lump of crumbled
earth under his feet--a cool, moist, black path of richness. The
furrow-slice was a long, almost unbroken ribbon of turf, each one laid
smoothly against the former strand, and under it lay crumpled and
crushed the layer of grass and flowers. The plow-point was long and
tapering, like the prow of a clipper, and ran far out under the beam,
and above it was the rolling colter, a circular blade of steel, which
cut the edge of the furrow as cleanly as cheese. The lay of the plow,
filed sharp at every round, lay flat, and clove the slice neatly from
the bosom of earth where it had lain from the beginning of time. As the
team steadily pulled the machine along, I heard a curious thrilling
sound as the knife went through the roots, a sort of murmuring as of
protest at this violation--and once in a while, the whole engine, and
the arms of the plowman also, felt a jar, like that of a ship striking a
hidden rock, as the share cut through a red-root--a stout root of wood,
like red cedar or mahogany, sometimes as large as one's arm, topped with
a clump of tough twigs with clusters of pretty whitish blossoms.

As I looked back at the results of my day's work, my spirits rose; for
in the East, a man might have worked all summer long to clear as much
land as I had prepared for a crop on that first day. This morning it had
been wilderness; now it was a field--a field in which Magnus Thorkelson
had planted corn, by the simple process of cutting through the sods with
an ax, and dropping in each opening thus made three kernels of corn.
Surely this was a new world! Surely, this was a world in which a man
with the will to do might make something