o be coaxed back into the choir by Virginia or Grandma
Thorndyke in order to preserve my self-respect. But neither of them
said anything about it. In fact, I thought that Grandma Thorndyke was
not so friendly in the spring as she had been in the fall--and, of
course, I could not put myself forward. I had the pure lunkhead pride.

So I had not seen Virginia for months. We early Iowa settlers, the men
and women who opened up the country to its great career of development,
shivered through that winter and many like it, in hovels that only broke
the force of the tempest but could not keep it back. The storms swept
across without a break in their fury as we cowered there, with no such
shelters as now make our winters seemingly so much milder. Now it is
hard to convince a man from the East that our state was once
bare prairie.

"It's funny," said the young doctor that married a granddaughter of mine
last summer, "that all your groves of trees seem to be in rows. Left
them that way, I suppose, when you cut down the forest."

The country looks as well wooded as the farming regions of Ohio or
Indiana. Trees grew like weeds when we set them out; and we set them out
as the years passed, by the million. I never went to the timber when the
sap was down, without bringing home one or more elms, lindens, maples,
hickories or even oaks--though the latter usually died. Most of the
lofty trees we see in every direction now, however, are cottonwoods,
willows and Lombardy poplars that were planted by the mere sticking in
the ground of a wand of the green tree. They hauled these "slips" into
Monterey County by the wagon-load after the settlers began their great
rush for the prairies; and how they grew! It was no bad symbol of the
state itself--a forest on four wheels.

What I began to write a few moments ago, though concerned the difference
between our winter climate then and now. Then the snow drifted before
our northwest winds in a moving ocean unbroken by corn-field, grove, or
farmstead. It smothered and overwhelmed you when caught out in it; and
after a drifting storm, the first groves we could see cast a shadow in
the blizzard; and there lay to the southeast of every block of trees a
long, pointed drift, diminishing to nothing at the point where ended the
influence of the grove--this new foe to the tempest which civilization
was planting. Our groves were yet too small of course to show themselves
in this fight against the elements th