at we did find, and did not find, there is not room fully to relate
here. Ours was at first the roughest kind of pioneering experience;
such as persons brought up in our well-to-do New England could not be
in the least prepared for, though they might imagine they were, as we
did. We were dropped down finally upon a vast green expense, extending
hundreds of miles north and south through the State of Illinois, then
known as Looking-Glass Prairie. The nearest cabin to our own was about
a mile away, and so small that at that distance it looked like a
shingle set up endwise in the grass. Nothing else was in sight, not
even a tree, although we could see miles and miles in every direction.
There were only the hollow blue heavens above us and the level green
prairie around us,--an immensity of intense loneliness. We seldom saw a
cloud in the sky, and never a pebble beneath our feet. If we could have
picked up the commonest one, we should have treasured it like a
diamond. Nothing in nature now seemed so beautiful to us as rocks. We
had never dreamed of a world without them; it seemed like living on a
floor without walls or foundations.

After a while we became accustomed to the vast sameness, and even liked
it in a lukewarm way. And there were times when it filled us with
emotions of grandeur. Boundlessness in itself is impressive; it makes
us feel our littleness, and yet releases us from that littleness.

The grass was always astir, blowing one way, like the waves of the sea;
for there was a steady, almost an unvarying wind from the south. It was
like the sea, and yet even more wonderful, for it was a sea of living
and growing things. The Spirit of God was moving upon the face of the
earth, and breathing everything into life. We were but specks on the
great landscape. But God was above it all, penetrating it and us with
his infinite warmth. The distance from human beings made the Invisible
One seem so near! Only Nature and ourselves now, face to face with Him!

We could scarcely have found in all the world a more complete contrast
to the moving crowds and the whir and dust of the City of Spindles,
than this unpeopled, silent prairie.

For myself, I know that I was sent in upon my own thoughts deeper than
I had ever been before. I began to question things which I had never
before doubted. I must have reality. Nothing but transparent truth
would bear the test of this great, solitary stillness. As the prairies
lay open to the s